A Life of William Shakespeare, by Sidney Lee

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Title: A Life of William Shakespeare
       with portraits and facsimiles


Author: Sidney Lee



Release Date: November 12, 2007  [eBook #23464]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE***

Transcribed from the 1899 Smith, Elder and Co. edition by Les Bowler.

A LIFE
of
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

by
SIDNEY LEE.

WITH PORTRAITS AND FACSIMILES

FOURTH EDITION

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
1899

[All rights reserved]

p. ivPrinted November 1898 (First Edition).

Reprinted December 1898 (Second Edition);  December 1898
(Third Edition);  February 1899 (Fourth Edition).

p. vPREFACE

This work is based on the article on Shakespeare which I contributed last year to the fifty-first volume of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’  But the changes and additions which the article has undergone during my revision of it for separate publication are so numerous as to give the book a title to be regarded as an independent venture.  In its general aims, however, the present life of Shakespeare endeavours loyally to adhere to the principles that are inherent in the scheme of the ‘Dictionary of National Biography.’  I have endeavoured to set before my readers a plain and practical narrative of the great dramatist’s personal history as concisely as the needs of clearness and completeness would permit.  I have sought to provide students of Shakespeare with a full record of the duly attested facts and dates of their master’s career.  I have avoided merely æsthetic criticism.  My estimates of the value of Shakespeare’s plays and poems are intended solely to fulfil the obligation that lies on the biographer of indicating p. visuccinctly the character of the successive labours which were woven into the texture of his hero’s life.  Æsthetic studies of Shakespeare abound, and to increase their number is a work of supererogation.  But Shakespearean literature, as far as it is known to me, still lacks a book that shall supply within a brief compass an exhaustive and well-arranged statement of the facts of Shakespeare’s career, achievement, and reputation, that shall reduce conjecture to the smallest dimensions consistent with coherence, and shall give verifiable references to all the original sources of information.  After studying Elizabethan literature, history, and bibliography for more than eighteen years, I believed that I might, without exposing myself to a charge of presumption, attempt something in the way of filling this gap, and that I might be able to supply, at least tentatively, a guide-book to Shakespeare’s life and work that should be, within its limits, complete and trustworthy.  How far my belief was justified the readers of this volume will decide.

I cannot promise my readers any startling revelations.  But my researches have enabled me to remove some ambiguities which puzzled my predecessors, and to throw light on one or two topics that have hitherto obscured the course of Shakespeare’s career.  Particulars that have not been before incorporated in Shakespeare’s biography will be found in my treatment of the following subjects: the conditions under which ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and the p. vii‘Merchant of Venice’ were written; the references in Shakespeare’s plays to his native town and county; his father’s applications to the Heralds’ College for coat-armour; his relations with Ben Jonson and the boy actors in 1601; the favour extended to his work by James I and his Court; the circumstances which led to the publication of the First Folio, and the history of the dramatist’s portraits.  I have somewhat expanded the notices of Shakespeare’s financial affairs which have already appeared in the article in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ and a few new facts will be found in my revised estimate of the poet’s pecuniary position.

In my treatment of the sonnets I have pursued what I believe to be an original line of investigation.  The strictly autobiographical interpretation that critics have of late placed on these poems compelled me, as Shakespeare’s biographer, to submit them to a very narrow scrutiny.  My conclusion is adverse to the claim of the sonnets to rank as autobiographical documents, but I have felt bound, out of respect to writers from whose views I dissent, to give in detail the evidence on which I base my judgment.  Matthew Arnold sagaciously laid down the maxim that ‘the criticism which alone can much help us for the future is a criticism which regards Europe as being, for intellectual and artistic [vii] purposes, one great confederation, p. viiibound to a joint action and working to a common result.’  It is criticism inspired by this liberalising principle that is especially applicable to the vast sonnet-literature which was produced by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.  It is criticism of the type that Arnold recommended that can alone lead to any accurate and profitable conclusion respecting the intention of the vast sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan era.  In accordance with Arnold’s suggestion, I have studied Shakespeare’s sonnets comparatively with those in vogue in England, France, and Italy at the time he wrote.  I have endeavoured to learn the view that was taken of such literary endeavours by contemporary critics and readers throughout Europe.  My researches have covered a very small portion of the wide field.  But I have gone far enough, I think, to justify the conviction that Shakespeare’s collection of sonnets has no reasonable title to be regarded as a personal or autobiographical narrative.

In the Appendix (Sections III. and IV.) I have supplied a memoir of Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton, and an account of the Earl’s relations with the contemporary world of letters.  Apart from Southampton’s association with the sonnets, he promoted Shakespeare’s welfare at an early stage of the dramatist’s career, and I can quote the authority of Malone, who appended a sketch of Southampton’s history to his biography of Shakespeare (in the p. ix‘Variorum’ edition of 1821), for treating a knowledge of Southampton’s life as essential to a full knowledge of Shakespeare’s.  I have also printed in the Appendix a detailed statement of the precise circumstances under which Shakespeare’s sonnets were published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609 (Section V.), and a review of the facts that seem to me to confute the popular theory that Shakespeare was a friend and protégé of William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke, who has been put forward quite unwarrantably as the hero of the sonnets (Sections VI., VII., VIII.) [ix]  I have also included in the Appendix (Sections IX. and X.) a survey of the voluminous sonnet-literature of the Elizabethan poets between 1591 and 1597, with which Shakespeare’s sonnetteering efforts were very closely allied, as well as a bibliographical note on a corresponding feature of French and Italian literature between 1550 and 1600.

Since the publication of the article on Shakespeare in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ I have received from correspondents many criticisms and suggestions which have enabled me to correct some errors.  But a few of my correspondents have exhibited so ingenuous a faith in those forged p. xdocuments relating to Shakespeare and forged references to his works, which were promulgated chiefly by John Payne Collier more than half a century ago, that I have attached a list of the misleading records to my chapter on ‘The Sources of Biographical Information’ in the Appendix (Section I.)  I believe the list to be fuller than any to be met with elsewhere.

The six illustrations which appear in this volume have been chosen on grounds of practical utility rather than of artistic merit.  My reasons for selecting as the frontispiece the newly discovered ‘Droeshout’ painting of Shakespeare (now in the Shakespeare Memorial Gallery at Stratford-on-Avon) can be gathered from the history of the painting and of its discovery which I give on pages 288-90.  I have to thank Mr. Edgar Flower and the other members of the Council of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford for permission to reproduce the picture.  The portrait of Southampton in early life is now at Welbeck Abbey, and the Duke of Portland not only permitted the portrait to be engraved for this volume, but lent me the negative from which the plate has been prepared.  The Committee of the Garrick Club gave permission to photograph the interesting bust of Shakespeare in their possession, [x] but, owing to the fact that it is moulded in black terra-cotta no satisfactory negative could be obtained; the p. xiengraving I have used is from a photograph of a white plaster cast of the original bust, now in the Memorial Gallery at Stratford.  The five autographs of Shakespeare’s signature—all that exist of unquestioned authenticity—appear in the three remaining plates.  The three signatures on the will have been photographed from the original document at Somerset House, by permission of Sir Francis Jenne, President of the Probate Court; the autograph on the deed of purchase by Shakespeare in 1613 of the house in Blackfriars has been photographed from the original document in the Guildhall Library, by permission of the Library Committee of the City of London; and the autograph on the deed of mortgage relating to the same property, also dated in 1613, has been photographed from the original document in the British Museum, by permission of the Trustees.  Shakespeare’s coat-of-arms and motto, which are stamped on the cover of this volume, are copied from the trickings in the margin of the draft-grants of arms now in the Heralds’ College.

The Baroness Burdett-Coutts has kindly given me ample opportunities of examining the two peculiarly interesting and valuable copies of the First Folio [xi] in her possession.  Mr. Richard Savage, of Stratford-on-Avon, the Secretary of the Birthplace Trustees, and Mr. W. Salt Brassington, the Librarian of the Shakespeare Memorial at Stratford, have courteously replied p. xiito the many inquiries that I have addressed to them verbally or by letter.  Mr. Lionel Cust, the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, has helped me to estimate the authenticity of Shakespeare’s portraits.  I have also benefited, while the work has been passing through the press, by the valuable suggestions of my friends the Rev. H. C. Beeching and Mr. W. J. Craig, and I have to thank Mr. Thomas Seccombe for the zealous aid he has rendered me while correcting the final proofs.

October 12, 1898.

p. xiiiCONTENTS

p. 1I—PARENTAGE AND BIRTH

Distribution of the name.

Shakespeare came of a family whose surname was borne through the middle ages by residents in very many parts of England—at Penrith in Cumberland, at Kirkland and Doncaster in Yorkshire, as well as in nearly all the midland counties.  The surname had originally a martial significance, implying capacity in the wielding of the spear. [1a]  Its first recorded holder is John Shakespeare, who in 1279 was living at ‘Freyndon,’ perhaps Frittenden, Kent. [1b]  The great mediæval guild of St. Anne at Knowle, whose members included the leading inhabitants of Warwickshire, was joined by many Shakespeares in the fifteenth century. [1c]  p. 2In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the surname is found far more frequently in Warwickshire than elsewhere.  The archives of no less than twenty-four towns and villages there contain notices of Shakespeare families in the sixteenth century, and as many as thirty-four Warwickshire towns or villages were inhabited by Shakespeare families in the seventeenth century.  Among them all William was a common Christian name.  At Rowington, twelve miles to the north of Stratford, and in the same hundred of Barlichway, one of the most prolific Shakespeare families of Warwickshire resided in the sixteenth century, and no less than three Richard Shakespeares of Rowington, whose extant wills were proved respectively in 1560, 1591, and 1614, were fathers of sons called William.  At least one other William Shakespeare was during the period a resident in Rowington.  As a consequence, the poet has been more than once credited with achievements which rightly belong to one or other of his numerous contemporaries who were identically named.

The poet’s ancestry.

The poet’s ancestry cannot be defined with absolute certainty.  The poet’s father, when applying for a grant of arms in 1596, claimed that his grandfather (the poet’s great-grandfather) received for services rendered in war a grant of land in Warwickshire from Henry VII. [2]  No precise confirmation of this pretension has been discovered, and it may be, after the manner of heraldic genealogy, fictitious.  But there is a probability that the poet p. 3came of good yeoman stock, and that his ancestors to the fourth or fifth generation were fairly substantial landowners. [3a]  Adam Shakespeare, a tenant by military service of land at Baddesley Clinton in 1389, seems to have been great-grandfather of one Richard Shakespeare who held land at Wroxhall in Warwickshire during the first thirty-four years (at least) of the sixteenth century.  Another Richard Shakespeare who is conjectured to have been nearly akin to the Wroxhall family was settled as a farmer at Snitterfield, a village four miles to the north of Stratford-on-Avon, in 1528. [3b]  It is probable that he was the poet’s grandfather.  In 1550 he was renting a messuage and land at Snitterfield of Robert Arden; he died at the close of 1560, and on February 10 of the next year letters of administration of his goods, chattels, and debts were issued to his son John by the Probate Court at Worcester.  His goods were valued at £35 17s. [3c]  Besides the son John, Richard of Snitterfield certainly had a son Henry; while a Thomas Shakespeare, a considerable landholder at p. 4Snitterfield between 1563 and 1583, whose parentage is undetermined, may have been a third son.  The son Henry remained all his life at Snitterfield, where he engaged in farming with gradually diminishing success; he died in embarrassed circumstances in December 1596.  John, the son who administered Richard’s estate, was in all likelihood the poet’s father.

The poet’s father.

About 1551 John Shakespeare left Snitterfield, which was his birthplace, to seek a career in the neighbouring borough of Stratford-on-Avon.  There he soon set up as a trader in all manner of agricultural produce.  Corn, wool, malt, meat, skins, and leather were among the commodities in which he dealt.  Documents of a somewhat later date often describe him as a glover.  Aubrey, Shakespeare’s first biographer, reported the tradition that he was a butcher.  But though both designations doubtless indicated important branches of his business, neither can be regarded as disclosing its full extent.  The land which his family farmed at Snitterfield supplied him with his varied stock-in-trade.  As long as his father lived he seems to have been a frequent visitor to Snitterfield, and, like his father and brothers, he was until the date of his father’s death occasionally designated a farmer or ‘husbandman’ of that place.  But it was with Stratford-on-Avon that his life was mainly identified.

His settlement at Stratford.

In April 1552 he was living there in Henley Street, a thoroughfare leading to the market town of Henley-in-Arden, and he is first mentioned in the borough records as paying in that month a fine of p. 5twelve-pence for having a dirt-heap in front of his house.  His frequent appearances in the years that follow as either plaintiff or defendant in suits heard in the local court of record for the recovery of small debts suggest that he was a keen man of business.  In early life he prospered in trade, and in October 1556 purchased two freehold tenements at Stratford—one, with a garden, in Henley Street (it adjoins that now known as the poet’s birthplace), and the other in Greenhill Street with a garden and croft.  Thenceforth he played a prominent part in municipal affairs.  In 1557 he was elected an ale-taster, whose duty it was to test the quality of malt liquors and bread.  About the same time he was elected a burgess or town councillor, and in September 1558, and again on October 6, 1559, he was appointed one of the four petty constables by a vote of the jury of the court-leet.  Twice—in 1559 and 1561—he was chosen one of the affeerors—officers appointed to determine the fines for those offences which were punishable arbitrarily, and for which no express penalties were prescribed by statute.  In 1561 he was elected one of the two chamberlains of the borough, an office of responsibility which he held for two years.  He delivered his second statement of accounts to the corporation in January 1564.  When attesting documents he occasionally made his mark, but there is evidence in the Stratford archives that he could write with facility; and he was credited with financial aptitude.  The municipal accounts, which were checked by tallies and counters, were audited by him after he p. 6ceased to be chamberlain, and he more than once advanced small sums of money to the corporation.

The poet’s mother.

With characteristic shrewdness he chose a wife of assured fortune—Mary, youngest daughter of Robert Arden, a wealthy farmer of Wilmcote in the parish of Aston Cantlowe, near Stratford.  The Arden family in its chief branch, which was settled at Parkhall, Warwickshire, ranked with the most influential of the county.  Robert Arden, a progenitor of that branch, was sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in 1438 (16 Hen. VI), and this sheriff’s direct descendant, Edward Arden, who was himself high sheriff of Warwickshire in 1575, was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. [6]  John Shakespeare’s wife belonged to a humbler branch of the family, and there is no trustworthy evidence to determine the exact degree of kinship between the two branches.  Her grandfather, Thomas Arden, purchased in 1501 an estate at Snitterfield, which passed, with other property, to her father Robert; John Shakespeare’s father, Richard, was one of this Robert Arden’s Snitterfield tenants.  By his first wife, whose name is not known, Robert Arden had seven daughters, of whom all but two married; John Shakespeare’s wife seems to have been the youngest.  Robert Arden’s second wife, Agnes or Anne, widow of John Hill (d. 1545), a substantial farmer of Bearley, survived him; but by her he had no issue.  When he died at the end of 1556, he owned a farmhouse at Wilmcote p. 7and many acres, besides some hundred acres at Snitterfield, with two farmhouses which he let out to tenants.  The post-mortem inventory of his goods, which was made on December 9, 1556, shows that he had lived in comfort; his house was adorned by as many as eleven ‘painted cloths,’ which then did duty for tapestries among the middle class.  The exordium of his will, which was drawn up on November 24, 1556, and proved on December 16 following, indicates that he was an observant Catholic.  For his two youngest daughters, Alice and Mary, he showed especial affection by nominating them his executors.  Mary received not only £6. 13s. 4d. in money, but the fee-simple of Asbies, his chief property at Wilmcote, consisting of a house with some fifty acres of land.  She also acquired, under an earlier settlement, an interest in two messuages at Snitterfield. [7]  But, although she was well provided with worldly goods, she was apparently without education; several extant documents bear her mark, and there is no proof that she could sign her name.

The poet’s birth and baptism.

John Shakespeare’s marriage with Mary Arden doubtless took place at Aston Cantlowe, the parish church of Wilmcote, in the autumn of 1557 (the church registers begin at a later date).  On September 15, 1558, his first child, a daughter, Joan, was baptised in the church of Stratford.  A second child, another daughter, Margaret, was baptised on December 2, 1562; but both these children died in infancy.  The poet William, the first son and third child, was p. 8born on April 22 or 23, 1564.  The latter date is generally accepted as his birthday, mainly (it would appear) on the ground that it was the day of his death.  There is no positive evidence on the subject, but the Stratford parish registers attest that he was baptised on April 26.

Alleged birthplace.

Some doubt is justifiable as to the ordinarily accepted scene of his birth.  Of two adjoining houses forming a detached building on the north side of Henley Street, that to the east was purchased by John Shakespeare in 1556, but there is no evidence that he owned or occupied the house to the west before 1575.  Yet this western house has been known since 1759 as the poet’s birthplace, and a room on the first floor is claimed as that in which he was born. [8]  The two houses subsequently came by bequest of the poet’s granddaughter to the family of the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, and while the eastern tenement was let out to strangers for more than two centuries, and by them converted into an inn, the ‘birthplace’ was until 1806 occupied by the Harts, who latterly carried on there the trade of butcher.  The fact of its long occupancy by the poet’s collateral descendants accounts for the identification of the western rather than the eastern tenement with his birthplace.  Both houses were purchased in behalf of subscribers to a public fund on September 16, 1847, and, after extensive restoration, were converted into a single domicile for the purposes of a public museum.  They were presented under a deed of p. 9trust to the corporation of Stratford in 1866.  Much of the Elizabethan timber and stonework survives, but a cellar under the ‘birthplace’ is the only portion which remains as it was at the date of the poet’s birth. [9]

p. 10II—CHILDHOOD, EDUCATION, AND MARRIAGE

The father in municipal office.

In July 1564, when William was three months old, the plague raged with unwonted vehemence at Stratford, and his father liberally contributed to the relief of its poverty-stricken victims.  Fortune still favoured him.  On July 4, 1565, he reached the dignity of an alderman.  From 1567 onwards he was accorded in the corporation archives the honourable prefix of ‘Mr.’  At Michaelmas 1568 he attained the highest office in the corporation gift, that of bailiff, and during his year of office the corporation for the first time entertained actors at Stratford.  The Queen’s Company and the Earl of Worcester’s Company each received from John Shakespeare an official welcome. [10]  On September 5, 1571, he was chief p. 11alderman, a post which he retained till September 30 the following year.  In 1573 Alexander Webbe, the husband of his wife’s sister Agnes, made him overseer of his will; in 1575 he bought two houses in Stratford, one of them doubtless the alleged birthplace in Henley Street; in 1576 he contributed twelvepence to the beadle’s salary.  But after Michaelmas 1572 he took a less active part in municipal affairs; he grew irregular in his attendance at the council meetings, and signs were soon apparent that his luck had turned.  In 1578 he was unable to pay, with his colleagues, either the sum of fourpence for the relief of the poor or his contribution ‘towards the furniture of three pikemen, two bellmen, and one archer’ who were sent by the corporation to attend a muster of the trained bands of the county.

Brothers and sisters.

Meanwhile his family was increasing.  Four children besides the poet—three sons, Gilbert (baptised October 13, 1566), Richard (baptised March 11, 1574), and Edmund (baptised May 3, 1580), with a daughter Joan (baptised April 15, 1569)—reached maturity.  A daughter Ann was baptised September 28, 1571, and was buried on April 4, 1579.  To meet his growing liabilities, the father borrowed money from his wife’s kinsfolk, and he and his wife p. 12mortgaged, on November 14, 1578, Asbies, her valuable property at Wilmcote, for £40 to Edmund Lambert of Barton-on-the-Heath, who had married her sister, Joan Arden.  Lambert was to receive no interest on his loan, but was to take the ‘rents and profits’ of the estate.  Asbies was thereby alienated for ever.  Next year, on October 15, 1579, John and his wife made over to Robert Webbe, doubtless a relative of Alexander Webbe, for the sum apparently of £40, his wife’s property at Snitterfield. [12a]

The father’s financial difficulties.

John Shakespeare obviously chafed under the humiliation of having parted, although as he hoped only temporarily, with his wife’s property of Asbies, and in the autumn of 1580 he offered to pay off the mortgage; but his brother-in-law, Lambert, retorted that other sums were owing, and he would accept all or none.  The negotiation, which was the beginning of much litigation, thus proved abortive.  Through 1585 and 1586 a creditor, John Brown, was embarrassingly importunate, and, after obtaining a writ of distraint, Brown informed the local court that the debtor had no goods on which distraint could be levied. [12b]  On September 6, 1586, John was deprived of his alderman’s gown, on the ground of his long absence from the council meetings. [12c]

p. 13Education.

Happily John Shakespeare was at no expense for the education of his four sons.  They were entitled to free tuition at the grammar school of Stratford, which was reconstituted on a mediæval foundation by Edward VI.  The eldest son, William, probably entered the school in 1571, when Walter Roche was master, and perhaps he knew something of Thomas Hunt, who succeeded Roche in 1577.  The instruction that he received was mainly confined to the Latin language and literature.  From the Latin accidence, boys of the period, at schools of the type of that at Stratford, were led, through conversation books like the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles’ and Lily’s grammar, to the perusal of such authors as Seneca Terence, Cicero, Virgil, Plautus, Ovid, and Horace.  The eclogues of the popular renaissance poet, Mantuanus, were often preferred to Virgil’s for beginners.  The rudiments of Greek were occasionally taught in Elizabethan grammar schools to very promising pupils; but such coincidences as have been detected between expressions in Greek plays and in Shakespeare seem due to accident, and not to any study, either at school or elsewhere, of the Athenian drama. [13]

p. 14Dr. Farmer enunciated in his ‘Essay on Shakespeare’s Learning’ (1767) the theory that Shakespeare knew no language but his own, and owed whatever knowledge he displayed of the classics and of Italian and French literature to English translations.  But several of the books in French and Italian whence Shakespeare derived the plots of his dramas—Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques,’ Ser Giovanni’s ‘Il Pecorone,’ and Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi,’ for examplep. 15—were not accessible to him in English translations; and on more general grounds the theory of his ignorance is adequately confuted.  A boy with Shakespeare’s exceptional alertness of intellect, during whose schooldays a training in Latin classics lay within reach, could hardly lack in future years all means of access to the literature of France and Italy.

The poet’s classical equipment.

With the Latin and French languages, indeed, and with many Latin poets of the school curriculum, Shakespeare in his writings openly acknowledged his acquaintance.  In ‘Henry V’ the dialogue in many scenes is carried on in French, which is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic.  In the mouth of his schoolmasters, Holofernes in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and Sir Hugh Evans in ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ Shakespeare placed Latin phrases drawn directly from Lily’s grammar, from the ‘Sententiæ Pueriles,’ and from ‘the good old Mantuan.’  The influence of Ovid, especially the ‘Metamorphoses,’ was apparent throughout his earliest literary work, both poetic and dramatic, and is discernible in the ‘Tempest,’ his latest play (v. i. 33 seq.)  In the Bodleian Library there is a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (1502), and on the title is the signature W^m. Sh^e., which experts have declared—not quite conclusively—to be a genuine autograph of the poet. [15]  Ovid’s Latin text was certainly not unfamiliar to him, but his closest adaptations of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ often reflect the phraseology of the popular English version by p. 16Arthur Golding, of which some seven editions were issued between 1565 and 1597.  From Plautus Shakespeare drew the plot of the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ but it is just possible that Plautus’s comedies, too, were accessible in English.  Shakespeare had no title to rank as a classical scholar, and he did not disdain a liberal use of translations.  His lack of exact scholarship fully accounts for the ‘small Latin and less Greek’ with which he was credited by his scholarly friend, Ben Jonson.  But Aubrey’s report that ‘he understood Latin pretty well’ need not be contested, and his knowledge of French may be estimated to have equalled his knowledge of Latin, while he doubtless possessed just sufficient acquaintance with Italian to enable him to discern the drift of an Italian poem or novel. [16]

Shakespeare and the Bible.

Of the few English books accessible to him in his schooldays, the chief was the English Bible, either in the popular Genevan version, first issued in a complete form in 1560, or in the Bishops’ revision of 1568, which the Authorised Version of 1611 closely followed.  References to scriptural characters and incidents are not conspicuous in Shakespeare’s plays, but, such as they are, they are drawn from all parts of the Bible, and indicate that general acquaintance with the narrative of both Old and New Testaments which a clever boy would be certain to acquire either in the schoolroom or at church on Sundays.  Shakespeare quotes or adapts p. 17biblical phrases with far greater frequency than he makes allusion to episodes in biblical history.  But many such phrases enjoyed proverbial currency, and others, which were more recondite, were borrowed from Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles’ and secular works whence he drew his plots.  As a rule his use of scriptural phraseology, as of scriptural history, suggests youthful reminiscence and the assimilative tendency of the mind in a stage of early development rather than close and continuous study of the Bible in adult life. [17a]

Withdrawal from school.

Shakespeare was a schoolboy in July 1575, when Queen Elizabeth made a progress through Warwickshire on a visit to her favourite, the Earl of Leicester, at his castle of Kenilworth.  References have been detected in Oberon’s vision in Shakespeare’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (II. ii. 148-68) to the fantastic pageants and masques with which the Queen during her stay was entertained in Kenilworth Park.  Leicester’s residence was only fifteen miles from Stratford, and it is possible that Shakespeare went thither with his father to witness some of the open-air festivities; but two full descriptions which were published in 1576, in pamphlet form, gave Shakespeare knowledge of all that took place. [17b]  Shakespeare’s opportunities of recreation outside Stratford were in any case restricted during his schooldays.  His father’s financial p. 18difficulties grew steadily, and they caused his removal from school at an unusually early age.  Probably in 1577, when he was thirteen, he was enlisted by his father in an effort to restore his decaying fortunes.  ‘I have been told heretofore,’ wrote Aubrey, ‘by some of the neighbours that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s trade,’ which, according to the writer, was that of a butcher.  It is possible that John’s ill-luck at the period compelled him to confine himself to this occupation, which in happier days formed only one branch of his business.  His son may have been formally apprenticed to him.  An early Stratford tradition describes him as ‘a butcher’s apprentice.’ [18]  ‘When he kill’d a calf,’ Aubrey proceeds less convincingly, ‘he would doe it in a high style and make a speech.  There was at that time another butcher’s son in this towne, that was held not at all inferior to him for a naturall witt, his acquaintance, and coetanean, but dyed young.’

The poet’s marriage.

At the end of 1582 Shakespeare, when little more than eighteen and a half years old, took a step which was little calculated to lighten his father’s anxieties.  He married.  His wife, according to the inscription on her tombstone, was his senior by eight years.  Rowe states that she ‘was the daughter of one Hathaway, said to have been a substantial yeoman in the neighbourhood of Stratford.’

Richard Hathaway of Shottery.  Anne Hathaway.

On September 1, 1581, Richard Hathaway, ‘husbandman’ of Shottery, a hamlet in the parish of Old p. 19Stratford, made his will, which was proved on July 9, 1582, and is now preserved at Somerset House.  His house and land, ‘two and a half virgates,’ had been long held in copyhold by his family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances.  His wife Joan, the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of her eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned.  Six other children—three sons and three daughters—received sums of money; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter, were each allotted £6 13s. 4d, ‘to be paid at the day of her marriage,’ a phrase common in wills of the period.  Anne and Agnes were in the sixteenth century alternative spellings of the same Christian name; and there is little doubt that the daughter ‘Agnes’ of Richard Hathaway’s will became, within a few months of Richard Hathaway’s death, Shakespeare’s wife.

Anne Hathaway’s cottage.

The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, and reached from Stratford by field-paths, undoubtedly once formed part of Richard Hathaway’s farmhouse, and, despite numerous alterations and renovations, still preserves many features of a thatched farmhouse of the Elizabethan period.  The house remained in the Hathaway family till 1838, although the male line became extinct in 1746.  It was purchased in behalf of the public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892.

The bond against impediments.

No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare’s marriage survives.  Although the parish of Stratford p. 20included Shottery, and thus both bride and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent on the subject.  A local tradition, which seems to have come into being during the present century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish registers now exist.  But one important piece of documentary evidence directly bearing on the poet’s matrimonial venture is accessible.  In the registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, ‘husbandmen of Stratford,’ bound themselves in the bishop’s consistory court, on November 28, 1582, in a surety of £40, to free the bishop of all liability should a lawful impediment—‘by reason of any precontract’ [i.e. with a third party] or consanguinity—be subsequently disclosed to imperil the validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare with Anne Hathaway.  On the assumption that no such impediment was known to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her ‘friends,’ the marriage might proceed ‘with once asking of the bannes of matrimony betwene them.’

Bonds of similar purport, although differing in significant details, are extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century.  They were obtainable on the payment of a fee to the bishop’s commissary, and had the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law.  But they were not p. 21common, and it was rare for persons in the comparatively humble position in life of Anne Hathaway and young Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of marriage by ‘thrice asking of the banns.’  Moreover, the wording of the bond which was drawn before Shakespeare’s marriage differs in important respects from that adopted in all other known examples. [21]  In the latter it is invariably provided that the marriage shall not take place without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and bridegroom.  In the case of the marriage of an ‘infant’ bridegroom the formal consent of his parents was absolutely essential to strictly regular procedure, although clergymen might be found who were ready to shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run the risk of solemnising the marriage of an ‘infant’ without inquiry as to the parents’ consent.  The clergyman who united Shakespeare in wedlock to Anne Hathaway was obviously of this easy temper.  Despite the circumstance that Shakespeare’s bride was of full age and he himself was by nearly three years a minor, the Shakespeare bond stipulated merely for the consent of the bride’s ‘friends,’ and ignored the bridegroom’s parents altogether.  Nor was this the only irregularity in the document.  In other pre-matrimonial covenants p. 22of the kind the name either of the bridegroom himself or of the bridegroom’s father figures as one of the two sureties, and is mentioned first of the two.  Had the usual form been followed, Shakespeare’s father would have been the chief party to the transaction in behalf of his ‘infant’ son.  But in the Shakespeare bond the sole sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery, the bride’s native place.  Sandells was a ‘supervisor’ of the will of the bride’s father, who there describes him as ‘my trustie friende and neighbour.’

Birth of a daughter.

The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding Shakespeare’s marriage suggests the true position of affairs.  Sandells and Richardson, representing the lady’s family, doubtless secured the deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend’s daughter had rendered essential to her reputation.  The wedding probably took place, without the consent of the bridegroom’s parents—it may be without their knowledge—soon after the signing of the deed.  Within six months—in May 1583—a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in the name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.

Formal betrothal probably dispensed with.

Shakespeare’s apologists have endeavoured to show that the public betrothal or formal ‘troth-plight’ which was at the time a common prelude to a wedding carried with it all the privileges of marriage.  But neither Shakespeare’s detailed description of a p. 23betrothal [23] nor of the solemn verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention much support.  Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it highly improbable that Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal preliminaries of a betrothal.  In that ceremony the parents of both contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom’s parents were actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.

A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet’s matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one ‘William Shakespeare,’ to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester’s register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day before the signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton.  The theory that the maiden name of Shakespeare’s wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to assume that the bishop’s clerk, when making a note of the grant of the license in his register, erred so extensively as to write Anne p. 24Whateley of Temple Grafton’ for ‘Anne Hathaway of Shottery.’  The husband of Anne Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet.  He was doubtless another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese of Worcester.  Had a license for the poet’s marriage been secured on November 27, [24] it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have entered next day into a bond ‘against impediments,’ the execution of which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a license but was wholly supererogatory after the grant was made.

p. 25III—THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD

Anne Hathaway’s greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of happy augury.  Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare’s dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage ‘an elder than herself,’ [25a] and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of ‘barren hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord,’ suggest a personal interpretation. [25b]  To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet’s case, the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the p. 26years that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with impatience.  Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2.  All the evidence points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford, and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw little of wife or children for eleven years.  Between the winter of 1585 and the autumn of 1596—an interval which synchronises with his first literary triumphs—there is only one shadowy mention of his name in Stratford records.  In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare’s name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on Edmund’s son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying £20.  But the deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the transaction. [26]

Poaching at Charlecote.

Shakespeare’s early literary work proves that while in the country he eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed knowledge of horses and dogs.  All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with them he doubtless as a youth practised many field sports.  Sympathetic references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early plays and p. 27poems. [27]  And his sporting experiences passed at times beyond orthodox limits.  A poaching adventure, according to a credible tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native place.  ‘He had,’ wrote Rowe in 1709, ‘by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among them, some, that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote near Stratford.  For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage, he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in London.’  The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the effect that Shakespeare ‘was much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement.’  The law of Shakespeare’s day (5 Eliz. cap. 21) p. 28punished deer-stealers with three months’ imprisonment and the payment of thrice the amount of the damage done.

Unwarranted doubts of the tradition.

The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century.  But Sir Thomas Lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and owned at Charlecote a warren in which a few harts or does doubtless found an occasional home.  Samuel Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied in his ‘Views on the Warwickshire Avon,’ 1795, an engraving of an old farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest.  An adjoining hovel was locally known for some years as Shakespeare’s ‘deer-barn,’ but no portion of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now removed), was Lucy’s property in Elizabeth’s reign, and the amended legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention. [28]

Justice Shallow

The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive.  No authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning ‘A parliament member, a justice of peace,’ which were p. 29represented to be Shakespeare’s on the authority of an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703.  But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress on Shakespearean drama.  Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence of the owner of Charlecote.  According to Archdeacon Davies of Saperton, Shakespeare’s ‘revenge was so great that’ he caricatured Lucy as ‘Justice Clodpate,’ who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as ‘a great man,’ and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy’s name, ‘three louses rampant for his arms.’  Justice Shallow, Davies’s ‘Justice Clodpate,’ came to birth in the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ (1598), and he is represented in the opening scene of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ as having come from Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a poaching raid on his estate.  The ‘three luces hauriant argent’ were the arms borne by the Charlecote Lucys, and the dramatist’s prolonged reference in this scene to the ‘dozen white luces’ on Justice Shallow’s ‘old coat’ fully establishes Shallow’s identity with Lucy.

The flight from Stratford.

The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned whether Shakespeare, on fleeing from Lucy’s persecution, at once sought an asylum in London.  William Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor, remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster ‘in his younger years,’ and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford he found some such employment in a neighbouring village.  The p. 30suggestion that he joined, at the end of 1585, a band of youths of the district in serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious confusion between him and others of his name. [30]  The knowledge of a soldier’s life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical experience, unless the evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect by force of his imagination.

p. 31IV—ON THE LONDON STAGE

The journey to London.

To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on foot during 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe. [31a]  Tradition points to that as Shakespeare’s favoured route, rather than to the road by Banbury and Aylesbury.  Aubrey asserts that at Grendon near Oxford, ‘he happened to take the humour of the constable in “Midsummer Night’s Dream”’—by which he meant, we may suppose, ‘Much Ado about Nothing’—but there were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably at Stratford itself.  The Crown Inn, (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of his resting-places.

Richard Field, his townsman.

To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have been known previously. [31b]  Richard p. 32Field, a native of Stratford, and son of a friend of Shakespeare’s father, had left Stratford in 1579 to serve an apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier, the London printer.  Shakespeare and Field, who was made free of the Stationers’ Company in 1587, were soon associated as author and publisher; but the theory that Field found work for Shakespeare in Vautrollier’s printing-office is fanciful. [32a]  No more can be said for the attempt to prove that he obtained employment as a lawyer’s clerk.  In view of his general quickness of apprehension, Shakespeare’s accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the attention that has been paid it, may be attributable in part to his observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved, and in part to early intercourse with members of the Inns of Court. [32b]

Theatrical employment.

Tradition and common-sense alike point to one of the only two theatres (The Theatre or The Curtain) that existed in London at the date of his arrival as an early scene of his regular occupation.  The compiler of ‘Lives of the Poets’ (1753) [32c] was the first to relate the story that p. 33his original connection with the playhouse was as holder of the horses of visitors outside the doors.  According to the same compiler, the story was related by D’Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton communicated it, made no use of it.  The two regular theatres of the time were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of The Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield.  There is no inherent improbability in the tale.  Dr. Johnson’s amplified version, in which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the purpose of tending visitors’ horses, sounds apocryphal.

A playhouse servitor.

There is every indication that Shakespeare was speedily offered employment inside the playhouse.  In 1587 the two chief companies of actors, claiming respectively the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord Leicester, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they visited Stratford.  Two subordinate companies, one of which claimed the patronage of the Earl of Essex and the other that of Lord Stafford, also performed in the town during the same year.  Shakespeare’s friends may have called the attention of the strolling players to the homeless youth, rumours of whose search for employment about the London theatres had doubtless reached Stratford.  From such incidents seems to have sprung the opportunity which offered Shakespeare fame and fortune.  According to Rowe’s vague statement, ‘he was received into the company then in being at first in a very mean rank.’  p. 34William Castle, the parish clerk of Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor.  Malone recorded in 1780 a stage tradition ‘that his first office in the theatre was that of prompter’s attendant’ or call-boy.  His intellectual capacity and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.

The acting companies.

Shakespeare’s earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a prominent member of the actor’s profession till near the end of his life.  By an Act of Parliament of 1571 (14 Eliz. cap. 2), which was re-enacted in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4), players were under the necessity of procuring a license to pursue their calling from a peer of the realm or ‘personage of higher degree;’ otherwise they were adjudged to be of the status of rogues and vagabonds.  The Queen herself and many Elizabethan peers were liberal in the exercise of their licensing powers, and few actors failed to secure a statutory license, which gave them a rank of respectability, and relieved them of all risk of identification with vagrants or ‘sturdy beggars.’  From an early period in Elizabeth’s reign licensed actors were organised into permanent companies.  In 1587 and following years, besides three companies of duly licensed boy-actors that were formed from the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Chapel p. 35Royal and from Westminster scholars, there were in London at least six companies of fully licensed adult actors; five of these were called after the noblemen to whom their members respectively owed their licenses (viz. the Earls of Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the Lord Admiral, Charles, lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them whose actors derived their license from the Queen was called the Queen’s Company.

The Lord Chamberlain’s company.

The patron’s functions in relation to the companies seem to have been mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors’ licenses.  Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each company’s history.  But there seems no doubt that the most influential of the companies named—that under the nominal patronage of the Earl of Leicester—passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September 25, 1592.  When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as patron and licenser was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain (d. July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir, George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in March 1597.  After King James’s succession in May 1603 the company was promoted to be the King’s players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it fully maintained the supremacy p. 36which, under its successive titles, it had already long enjoyed.

A member of the Lord Chamberlain’s.

It is fair to infer that this was the company that Shakespeare originally joined and adhered to through life.  Documentary evidence proves that he was a member of it in December 1594; in May, 1603 he was one of its leaders.  Four of its chief members—Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor of the day, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips were among Shakespeare’s lifelong friends.  Under this company’s auspices, moreover, Shakespeare’s plays first saw the light.  Only two of the plays claimed for him—‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘3 Henry VI’—seem to have been performed by other companies (the Earl of Sussex’s men in the one case, and the Earl of Pembroke’s in the other).

The London theatres.

When Shakespeare became a member of the company it was doubtless performing at The Theatre, the playhouse in Shoreditch which James Burbage, the father of the great actor, Richard Burbage, had constructed in 1576; it abutted on the Finsbury Fields, and stood outside the City’s boundaries.  The only other London playhouse then in existence—the Curtain in Moorfields—was near at hand; its name survives in Curtain Road, Shoreditch.  But at an early date in his acting career Shakespeare’s company sought and found new quarters.  While known as Lord Strange’s men, they opened on February 19, 1592, a third London theatre, called the Rose, which Philip Henslowe, the speculative p. 37theatrical manager, had erected on the Bankside, Southwark.  At the date of the inauguration of the Rose Theatre Shakespeare’s company was temporarily allied with another company, the Admiral’s men, who numbered the great actor Edward Alleyn among them.  Alleyn for a few months undertook the direction of the amalgamated companies, but they quickly parted, and no further opportunity was offered Shakespeare of enjoying professional relations with Alleyn.  The Rose Theatre was doubtless the earliest scene of Shakespeare’s pronounced successes alike as actor and dramatist.  Subsequently for a short time in 1594 he frequented the stage of another new theatre at Newington Butts, and between 1595 and 1599 the older stages of the Curtain and of The Theatre in Shoreditch.  The Curtain remained open till the Civil Wars, although its vogue after 1600 was eclipsed by that of younger rivals.  In 1599 Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert demolished the old building of The Theatre and built, mainly out of the materials of the dismantled fabric, the famous theatre called the Globe on the Bankside.  It was octagonal in shape, and built of wood, and doubtless Shakespeare described it (rather than the Curtain) as ‘this wooden O’ in the opening chorus of ‘Henry V’ (1. 13).  After 1599 the Globe was mainly occupied by Shakespeare’s company, and in its profits he acquired an important share.  From the date of its inauguration until the poet’s retirement, the Globe—which quickly won the first place among London theatres—seems to have been the sole playhouse with p. 38which Shakespeare was professionally associated.  The equally familiar Blackfriars Theatre, which was created out of a dwelling-house by James Burbage, the actor’s father, at the end of 1596, was for many years afterwards leased out to the company of boy-actors known as ‘the Queen’s Children of the Chapel;’ it was not occupied by Shakespeare’s company until December 1609 or January 1610, when his acting days were nearing their end. [38a]

Place of residence in London.

In London Shakespeare resided near the theatres.  According to a memorandum by Alleyn (which Malone quoted), he lodged in 1596 near ‘the Bear Garden in Southwark.’  In 1598 one William Shakespeare, who was assessed by the collectors of a subsidy in the sum of 13s. 4d. upon goods valued at £5, was a resident in St. Helen’s parish, Bishopsgate, but it is not certain that this taxpayer was the dramatist. [38b]

Shakespeare’s alleged travels.  In Scotland.

The chief differences between the methods of theatrical representation in Shakespeare’s day and our own lay in the fact that neither scenery nor scenic costume nor women-actors were known to the Elizabethan stage.  All female rôles were, until the Restoration in 1660, assumed in the public theatres by men or boys. [38c]  Consequently the skill needed to rouse in the audience the requisite illusions p. 39was far greater then than at later periods.  But the professional customs of Elizabethan actors approximated in other respects more closely to those of their modern successors than is usually recognised.  The practice of touring in the provinces was followed with even greater regularity then than now.  Few companies p. 40remained in London during the summer or early autumn, and every country town with two thousand or more inhabitants could reckon on at least one visit from travelling actors between May and October.  A rapid examination of the extant archives of some seventy municipalities selected at random shows that Shakespeare’s company between 1594 and 1614 frequently performed in such towns as Barnstaple, Bath, Bristol, Coventry, Dover, Faversham, Folkestone, Hythe, Leicester, Maidstone, Marlborough, New Romney, Oxford, Rye in Sussex, Saffron Walden, and Shrewsbury. [40a]  Shakespeare may be credited with faithfully fulfilling all his professional functions, and some of the references to travel in his sonnets were doubtless reminiscences of early acting tours.  It has been repeatedly urged, moreover, that Shakespeare’s company visited Scotland, and that he went with it. [40b]  In November 1599 p. 41English actors arrived in Scotland under the leadership of Lawrence Fletcher and one Martin, and were welcomed with enthusiasm by the king. [41a]  Fletcher was a colleague of Shakespeare in 1603, but is not known to have been one earlier.  Shakespeare’s company never included an actor named Martin.  Fletcher repeated the visit in October 1601. [41b]  There is nothing to indicate that any of his companions belonged to Shakespeare’s company.  In like manner, Shakespeare’s accurate reference in ‘Macbeth’ to the ‘nimble’ but ‘sweet’ climate of Inverness, [41c] and the vivid impression he conveys of p. 42the aspects of wild Highland heaths, have been judged to be the certain fruits of a personal experience; but the passages in question, into which a more definite significance has possibly been read than Shakespeare intended, can be satisfactorily accounted for by his inevitable intercourse with Scotsmen in London and the theatres after James I’s accession.

In Italy.

A few English actors in Shakespeare’s day occasionally combined to make professional tours through foreign lands, where Court society invariably gave them a hospitable reception.  In Denmark, Germany, Austria, Holland, and France, many dramatic performances were given before royal audiences by English actors between 1580 and 1630. [42a]  That Shakespeare joined any of these expeditions is highly improbable.  Actors of small account at home mainly took part in them, and Shakespeare’s name appears in no extant list of those who paid professional visits abroad.  It is, in fact, unlikely that Shakespeare ever set foot on the continent of Europe in either a private or professional capacity.  He repeatedly ridicules the craze for foreign travel. [42b]  To Italy, it is true, and especially to cities of Northern Italy, like Venice, Padua, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, he makes frequent and familiar reference, and p. 43he supplied many a realistic portrayal of Italian life and sentiment.  But the fact that he represents Valentine in the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (I. i. 71) as travelling from Verona to Milan by sea, and Prospero in ‘The Tempest’ as embarking on a ship at the gates of Milan (I. ii. 129-44), renders it almost impossible that he could have gathered his knowledge of Northern Italy from personal observation. [43a]  He doubtless owed all to the verbal reports of travelled friends or to books, the contents of which he had a rare power of assimilating and vitalising.

Shakespeare’s rôles.

The publisher Chettle wrote in 1592 that Shakespeare was ‘exelent in the qualitie [43b] he professes,’ and the old actor William Beeston asserted in the next century that Shakespeare ‘did act exceedingly well.’ [43c]  But the rôles in which he distinguished himself are imperfectly recorded.  Few surviving documents refer directly to performances by him.  At Christmas 1594 he joined the popular actors William Kemp, the chief comedian of the day, and Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic actor, in ‘two several comedies or interludes’ which were acted on St. Stephen’s Day and on Innocents’ Day (December 27 and 28) at Greenwich Palace before the Queen.  The players received ‘xiiili. vjs. viiid. and by waye of her Majesties p. 44rewarde vili. xiiis. iiijd., in all xxli. [44a]  Neither plays nor parts are named.  Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list of those who took part in the original performances of Ben Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour’ (1598).  In the original edition of Jonson’s ‘Sejanus’ (1603) the actors’ names are arranged in two columns, and Shakespeare’s name heads the second column, standing parallel with Burbage’s, which heads the first.  But here again the character allotted to each actor is not stated.  Rowe identified only one of Shakespeare’s parts, ‘the Ghost in his own “Hamlet,”’ and Rowe asserted his assumption of that character to be ‘the top of his performance.’  John Davies of Hereford noted that he ‘played some kingly parts in sport.’ [44b]  One of Shakespeare’s younger brothers, presumably Gilbert, often came, wrote Oldys, to London in his younger days to see his brother act in his own plays; and in his old age, when his memory was failing, he recalled his brother’s performance of Adam in ‘As you like it.’  In the 1623 folio edition of Shakespeare’s ‘Works’ his name heads the prefatory list ‘of the principall actors in all these playes.’

Alleged scorn of an actor’s calling.

That Shakespeare chafed under some of the conditions of the actor’s calling is commonly inferred from the ‘Sonnets.’  There he reproaches himself with becoming ‘a motley to the view’ (cx. 2), and chides fortune for having provided for his livelihood nothing better than ‘public p. 45means that public manners breed,’ whence his name received a brand (cxi. 4-5).  If such self-pity is to be literally interpreted, it only reflected an evanescent mood.  His interest in all that touched the efficiency of his profession was permanently active.  He was a keen critic of actors’ elocution, and in ‘Hamlet’ shrewdly denounced their common failings, but clearly and hopefully pointed out the road to improvement.  His highest ambitions lay, it is true, elsewhere than in acting, and at an early period of his theatrical career he undertook, with triumphant success, the labours of a playwright.  But he pursued the profession of an actor loyally and uninterruptedly until he resigned all connection with the theatre within a few years of his death.

p. 46V.—EARLY DRAMATIC EFFORTS

Dramatic work.

The whole of Shakespeare’s dramatic work was probably begun and ended within two decades (1591-1611), between his twenty-seventh and forty-seventh year.  If the works traditionally assigned to him include some contributions from other pens, he was perhaps responsible, on the other hand, for portions of a few plays that are traditionally claimed for others.  When the account is balanced, Shakespeare must be credited with the production, during these twenty years, of a yearly average of two plays, nearly all of which belong to the supreme rank of literature.  Three volumes of poems must be added to the total.  Ben Jonson was often told by the players that ‘whatsoever he penned he never blotted out (i.e. erased) a line.’  The editors of the First Folio attested that ‘what he thought he uttered with that easinesse that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.’  Signs of hasty workmanship are not lacking, but they are few when it is considered how rapidly his numerous compositions came from his pen, and they are in the aggregate unimportant.

His borrowed plots.

By borrowing his plots he to some extent economised his energy, but he transformed most of them, p. 47and it was not probably with the object of conserving his strength that he systematically levied loans on popular current literature like Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles,’ North’s translation of ‘Plutarch,’ widely read romances, and successful plays.  In this regard he betrayed something of the practical temperament which is traceable in the conduct of the affairs of his later life.  It was doubtless with the calculated aim of ministering to the public taste that he unceasingly adapted, as his genius dictated, themes which had already, in the hands of inferior writers or dramatists, proved capable of arresting public attention.

The revision of plays.

The professional playwrights sold their plays outright to one or other of the acting companies, and they retained no legal interest in them after the manuscript had passed into the hands of the theatrical manager. [47]  It was not unusual for the manager to invite extensive revision of a play at the hands of others than its author before it was produced on the stage, and again whenever it was revived.  Shakespeare gained his earliest experience as a dramatist by revising or rewriting behind the scenes plays that had become the property of his manager.  It is possible that some of his labours in this direction p. 48remain unidentified.  In a few cases his alterations were slight, but as a rule his fund of originality was too abundant to restrict him, when working as an adapter, to mere recension, and the results of most of his labours in that capacity are entitled to rank among original compositions.

Chronology of the plays.  Metrical tests.

The determination of the exact order in which Shakespeare’s plays were written depends largely on conjecture.  External evidence is accessible in only a few cases, and, although always worthy of the utmost consideration, is not invariably conclusive.  The date of publication rarely indicates the date of composition.  Only sixteen of the thirty-seven plays commonly assigned to Shakespeare were published in his lifetime, and it is questionable whether any were published under his supervision. [48]  But subject-matter and metre both afford rough clues to the period in his career to which each p. 49play may be referred.  In his early plays the spirit of comedy or tragedy appears in its simplicity; as his powers gradually matured he depicted life in its most complex involutions, and portrayed with masterly insight the subtle gradations of human sentiment and the mysterious workings of human passion.  Comedy and tragedy are gradually blended; and his work finally developed a pathos such as could only come of ripe experience.  Similarly the metre undergoes emancipation from the hampering restraints of fixed rule and becomes flexible enough to respond to every phase of human feeling.  In the blank verse of the early plays a pause is strictly observed at the close of each line, and rhyming couplets are frequent.  Gradually the poet overrides such artificial restrictions; rhyme largely disappears; recourse is more frequently made to prose; the pause is varied indefinitely; extra syllables are, contrary to strict metrical law, introduced at the end of lines, and at times in the middle; the last word of the line is often a weak and unemphatic conjunction or preposition. [49]  To the latest plays fantastic and punning conceits which abound in early work are rarely accorded admission.  But, while Shakespeare’s p. 50achievement from the beginning to the end of his career offers clearer evidence than that of any other writer of genius of the steady and orderly growth of his poetic faculty, some allowance must be made for ebb and flow in the current of his artistic progress.  Early work occasionally anticipates features that become habitual to late work, and late work at times embodies traits that are mainly identified with early work.  No exclusive reliance in determining the precise chronology can be placed on the merely mechanical tests afforded by tables of metrical statistics.  The chronological order can only be deduced with any confidence from a consideration of all the internal characteristics as well as the known external history of each play.  The premisses are often vague and conflicting, and no chronology hitherto suggested receives at all points universal assent.

‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’

There is no external evidence to prove that any piece in which Shakespeare had a hand was produced before the spring of 1592.  No play by him was published before 1597, and none bore his name on the title-page till 1598.  But his first essays have been with confidence allotted to 1591.  To ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ may reasonably be assigned priority in point of time of all Shakespeare’s dramatic productions.  Internal evidence alone indicates the date of composition, and proves that it was an early effort; but the subject-matter suggests that its author had already enjoyed extended opportunities of surveying London life and manners, such as were hardly open to him in the very first years of his settlement in the p. 51metropolis.  ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ embodies keen observation of contemporary life in many ranks of society, both in town and country, while the speeches of the hero Biron clothe much sound philosophy in masterly rhetoric.  Its slender plot stands almost alone among Shakespeare’s plots in that it is not known to have been borrowed, and stands quite alone in openly travestying known traits and incidents of current social and political life.  The names of the chief characters are drawn from the leaders in the civil war in France, which was in progress between 1589 and 1594, and was anxiously watched by the English public. [51]  Contemporary projects of academies for p. 52disciplining young men; fashions of speech and dress current in fashionable circles; recent attempts on the part of Elizabeth’s government to negotiate with the Tsar of Russia; the inefficiency of rural constables and the pedantry of village schoolmasters and curates are all satirised with good humour.  The play was revised in 1597, probably for a performance at Court.  It was first published next year, and on the title-page, which described the piece as ‘newly corrected and augmented,’ Shakespeare’s name first appeared in print as that of author of a play.

‘Two Gentlemen of Verona.’

Less gaiety characterised another comedy of the same date, ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ which dramatises a romantic story of love and friendship.  There is every likelihood that it was an adaptation—amounting to a p. 53reformation—of a lost ‘History of Felix and Philomena,’ which had been acted at Court in 1584.  The story is the same as that of ‘The Shepardess Felismena’ in the Spanish pastoral romance of ‘Diana’ by George de Montemayor, which long enjoyed popularity in England.  No complete English translation of ‘Diana’ was published before that of Bartholomew Yonge in 1598, but a manuscript version by Thomas Wilson, which was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton in 1596, was possibly circulated far earlier.  Some verses from ‘Diana’ were translated by Sir Philip Sidney and were printed with his poems as early as 1591.  Barnabe Rich’s story of ‘Apollonius and Silla’ (from Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi’), which Shakespeare employed again in ‘Twelfth Night,’ also gave him some hints.  Trifling and irritating conceits abound in the ‘Two Gentlemen,’ but passages of high poetic spirit are not wanting, and the speeches of the clowns, Launce and Speed—the precursors of a long line of whimsical serving-men—overflow with farcical drollery.  The ‘Two Gentlemen’ was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime; it first appeared in the folio of 1623, after having, in all probability, undergone some revision. [53]

‘Comedy of Errors.’

Shakespeare next tried his hand, in the ‘Comedy of Errors’ (commonly known at the time as ‘Errors’), at boisterous farce.  It also was first published in 1623.  Again, as in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ allusion was made to the civil war in France.  France was described as ‘making war against her heir’ p. 54(III. ii. 125).  Shakespeare’s farcical comedy, which is by far the shortest of all his dramas, may have been founded on a play, no longer extant, called ‘The Historie of Error,’ which was acted in 1576 at Hampton Court.  In subject-matter it resembles the ‘Menæchmi’ of Plautus, and treats of mistakes of identity arising from the likeness of twin-born children.  The scene (act iii. sc. i.) in which Antipholus of Ephesus is shut out from his own house, while his brother and wife are at dinner within, recalls one in the ‘Amphitruo’ of Plautus.  Shakespeare doubtless had direct recourse to Plautus as well as to the old play, and he may have read Plautus in English.  The earliest translation of the ‘Menæchmi’ was not licensed for publication before June 10, 1594, and was not published until the following year.  No translation of any other play of Plautus appeared before.  But it was stated in the preface to this first published translation of the ‘Menæchmi’ that the translator, W. W., doubtless William Warner, a veteran of the Elizabethan world of letters, had some time previously ‘Englished’ that and ‘divers’ others of Plautus’s comedies, and had circulated them in manuscript ‘for the use of and delight of his private friends, who, in Plautus’s own words, are not able to understand them.’

‘Romeo and Juliet.’

Such plays as these, although each gave promise of a dramatic capacity out of the common way, cannot be with certainty pronounced to be beyond the ability of other men.  It was in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ Shakespeare’s first tragedy, that he proved himself p. 55the possessor of a poetic and dramatic instinct of unprecedented quality.  In ‘Romeo and Juliet’ he turned to account a tragic romance of Italian origin, [55a] which was already popular in English versions.  Arthur Broke rendered it into English verse from the Italian of Bandello in 1562, and William Painter had published it in prose in his ‘Palace of Pleasure’ in 1567.  Shakespeare made little change in the plot as drawn from Bandello by Broke, but he impregnated it with poetic fervour, and relieved the tragic intensity by developing the humour of Mercutio, and by grafting on the story the new comic character of the Nurse. [55b]  The ecstasy of youthful passion is portrayed by Shakespeare in language of the highest lyric beauty, and although a predilection for quibbles and conceits occasionally passes beyond the author’s control, ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ as a tragic poem on the theme of love, has no rival in any literature.  If the Nurse’s remark, ‘’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years’ (I. iii. 23), be taken p. 56literally, the composition of the play must be referred to 1591, for no earthquake in the sixteenth century was experienced in England after 1580.  There are a few parallelisms with Daniel’s ‘Complainte of Rosamond,’ published in 1592, and it is probable that Shakespeare completed the piece in that year.  It was first printed anonymously and surreptitiously by John Danter in 1597 from an imperfect acting copy.  A second quarto of 1599 (by T. Creede for Cuthbert Burbie) was printed from an authentic version, but the piece had probably undergone revision since its first production. [56]

Of the original representation on the stage of three other pieces of the period we have more explicit information.  These reveal Shakespeare undisguisedly as an adapter of plays by other hands.  Though they lack the interest attaching to his unaided work, they throw invaluable light on some of his early methods of composition and his early relations with other dramatists.

‘Henry VI.’

On March 3, 1592, a new piece, called ‘Henry VI,’ was acted at the Rose Theatre by Lord Strange’s men.  It was no doubt the play which was subsequently known as Shakespeare’s ‘The First Part of Henry VI.’  On its first performance it won a popular triumph.  ‘How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French),’ wrote Nash in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse’ (1592, licensed August 8), in reference to the striking scenes of Talbot’s death (act iv. sc. vi. and vii.), ‘to thinke that after he had p. 57lyne two hundred yeares in his Tombe, hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least (at severall times) who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!’  There is no categorical record of the production of a second piece in continuation of the theme, but such a play quickly followed; for a third piece, treating of the concluding incidents of Henry VI’s reign, attracted much attention on the stage early in the following autumn.

Greene’s attack.  Chettle’s apology.

The applause attending the completion of this historical trilogy caused bewilderment in the theatrical profession.  The older dramatists awoke to the fact that their popularity was endangered by the young stranger who had set up his tent in their midst, and one veteran uttered without delay a rancorous protest.  Robert Greene, who died on September 3, 1592, wrote on his deathbed an ill-natured farewell to life, entitled ‘A Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance.’  Addressing three brother dramatists—Marlowe, Nash, and Peele or Lodge—he bade them beware of puppets ‘that speak from our mouths,’ and of ‘antics garnished in our colours.’  ‘There is,’ he continued, ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his owne conceit, the only Shake-scene in a countrie. . . .  Never more acquaint [those apes] with your admired inventions, p. 58for it is pity men of such rare wits should be subject to the pleasures of such rude groomes.’  The ‘only Shake-scene’ is a punning denunciation of Shakespeare.  The tirade was probably inspired by an established author’s resentment at the energy of a young actor—the theatre’s factotum—in revising the dramatic work of his seniors with such masterly effect as to imperil their hold on the esteem of manager and playgoer.  The italicised quotation travesties a line from the third piece in the trilogy of Shakespeare’s ‘Henry VI:’

Oh Tiger’s heart wrapt in a woman’s hide.

But Shakespeare’s amiability of character and versatile ability had already won him admirers, and his successes excited the sympathetic regard of colleagues more kindly than Greene.  In December 1592 Greene’s publisher, Henry Chettle, prefixed an apology for Greene’s attack on the young actor to his ‘Kind Hartes Dreame,’ a tract reflecting on phases of contemporary social life.  ‘I am as sory,’ Chettle wrote, ‘as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because myselfe have seene his [i.e. Shakespeare’s] demeanour no lesse civill than he [is] exelent in the qualitie he professes, besides divers of worship have reported his uprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that aprooves his art.’

Divided authorship of ‘Henry VI.’

The first of the three plays dealing with the reign of Henry VI was originally published in the collected edition of Shakespeare’s works; the second and third p. 59plays were previously printed in a form very different from that which they subsequently assumed when they followed the first part in the folio.  Criticism has proved beyond doubt that in these plays Shakespeare did no more than add, revise, and correct other men’s work.  In ‘The First Part of Henry VI’ the scene in the Temple Gardens, where white and red roses are plucked as emblems by the rival political parties (act ii. sc. iv.), the dying speech of Mortimer, and perhaps the wooing of Margaret by Suffolk, alone bear the impress of his style.  A play dealing with the second part of Henry VI’s reign was published anonymously from a rough stage copy in 1594, with the title ‘The first part of the Contention betwixt the two famous houses of Yorke and Lancaster.’  A play dealing with the third part was published with greater care next year under the title ‘The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke, and the death of good King Henry the Sixt, as it was sundrie times acted by the Earl of Pembroke his servants.’  In both these plays Shakespeare’s revising hand can be traced.  The humours of Jack Cade in ‘The Contention’ can owe their savour to him alone.  After he had hastily revised the original drafts of the three pieces, perhaps with another’s aid, they were put on the stage in 1592, the first two parts by his own company (Lord Strange’s men), and the third, under some exceptional arrangement, by Lord Pembroke’s men.  But Shakespeare was not content to leave them thus.  Within a brief p. 60interval, possibly for a revival, he undertook a more thorough revision, still in conjunction with another writer.  ‘The First Part of The Contention’ was thoroughly overhauled, and was converted into what was entitled in the folio ‘The Second Part of Henry VI;’ there more than half the lines are new.  ‘The True Tragedie,’ which became ‘The Third Part of Henry VI,’ was less drastically handled; two-thirds of it was left practically untouched; only a third was thoroughly remodelled. [60]

Shakespeare’s coadjutors.

Who Shakespeare’s coadjutors were in the two successive revisions of ‘Henry VI’ is matter for conjecture.  The theory that Greene and Peele produced the original draft of the three parts of ‘Henry VI,’ which Shakespeare recast, may help to account for Greene’s indignant denunciation of Shakespeare as ‘an upstart crow, beautified with the feathers’ of himself and his fellow dramatists.  Much can be said, too, in behalf of the suggestion that Shakespeare joined Marlowe, the greatest of his predecessors, in the first revision of which ‘The Contention’ and the ‘True Tragedie’ were the outcome.  Most of the new passages in the second recension seem assignable to Shakespeare alone, but a few suggest a partnership resembling that of the first revision.  It is probable that Marlowe began the final revision, but his task was interrupted by his death, and the lion’s share of the work fell to his younger coadjutor.

Shakespeare’s assimilative power.

p. 61Shakespeare shared with other men of genius that receptivity of mind which impels them to assimilate much of the intellectual effort of their contemporaries and to transmute it in the process from unvalued ore into pure gold.  Had Shakespeare not been professionally employed in recasting old plays by contemporaries, he would doubtless have shown in his writings traces of a study of their work.  The verses of Thomas Watson, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Sir Philip Sidney, and Thomas Lodge were certainly among the rills which fed the mighty river of his poetic and lyric invention.  Kyd and Greene, among rival writers of tragedy, left more or less definite impression on all Shakespeare’s early efforts in tragedy.  It was, however, only to two of his fellow dramatists that his indebtedness as a writer of either comedy or tragedy was material or emphatically defined.  Superior as Shakespeare’s powers were to those of Marlowe, his coadjutor in ‘Henry VI,’ his early tragedies often reveal him in the character of a faithful disciple of that vehement delineator of tragic passion.  Shakespeare’s early comedies disclose a like relationship between him and Lyly.

Lyly’s influence in comedy.

Lyly is best known as the author of the affected romance of ‘Euphues,’ but between 1580 and 1592 he produced eight trivial and insubstantial comedies, of which six were written in prose, one was in blank verse, and one was in rhyme.  Much of the dialogue in Shakespeare’s comedies, from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ to ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ p. 62consists in thrusting and parrying fantastic conceits, puns, or antitheses.  This is the style of intercourse in which most of Lyly’s characters exclusively indulge.  Three-fourths of Lyly’s comedies lightly revolve about topics of classical or fairy mythology—in the very manner which Shakespeare first brought to a triumphant issue in his ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’  Shakespeare’s treatment of eccentric character like Don Armado in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and his boy Moth reads like a reminiscence of Lyly’s portrayal of Sir Thopas, a fat vainglorious knight, and his boy Epiton in the comedy of ‘Endymion,’ while the watchmen in the same play clearly adumbrate Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Verges.  The device of masculine disguise for love-sick maidens was characteristic of Lyly’s method before Shakespeare ventured on it for the first of many times in ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ and the dispersal through Lyly’s comedies of songs possessing every lyrical charm is not the least interesting of the many striking features which Shakespeare’s achievements in comedy seem to borrow from Lyly’s comparatively insignificant experiments. [62]

Marlowe’s influence in tragedy.  ‘Richard III.’

Marlowe, who alone of Shakespeare’s contemporaries can be credited with exerting on his efforts p. 63in tragedy a really substantial influence, was in 1592 and 1593 at the zenith of his fame.  Two of Shakespeare’s earliest historical tragedies, ‘Richard III’ and ‘Richard II,’ with the story of Shylock in his somewhat later comedy of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ plainly disclose a conscious resolve to follow in Marlowe’s footsteps.  In ‘Richard III’ Shakespeare, working single-handed, takes up the history of England near the point at which Marlowe and he, apparently working in partnership, left it in the third part of ‘Henry VI.’  The subject was already familiar to dramatists, but Shakespeare sought his materials in the ‘Chronicle’ of Holinshed.  A Latin piece, by Dr. Thomas Legge, had been in favour with academic audiences since 1579, and in 1594 the ‘True Tragedie of Richard III’ from some other pen was published anonymously; but Shakespeare’s piece bears little resemblance to either.  Throughout Shakespeare’s ‘Richard III’ the effort to emulate Marlowe is undeniable.  The tragedy is, says Mr. Swinburne, ‘as fiery in passion, as single in purpose, as rhetorical often, though never so inflated in expression, as Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” itself.’  The turbulent piece was naturally popular.  Burbage’s impersonation of the hero was one of his most effective performances, and his vigorous enunciation of ‘A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!’ gave the line proverbial currency.

‘Richard II.’

‘Richard II’ seems to have followed ‘Richard III’ without delay.  Subsequently both were published anonymously in the same year (1597) as they had p. 64‘been publikely acted by the right Honorable the Lorde Chamberlaine his servants;’ but the deposition scene in ‘Richard II,’ which dealt with a topic distasteful to the Queen, was omitted from the early impressions.  Prose is avoided throughout the play, a certain sign of early work.  The piece was probably composed very early in 1593.  Marlowe’s tempestuous vein is less apparent in ‘Richard II’ than in ‘Richard III.’  But if ‘Richard II’ be in style and treatment less deeply indebted to Marlowe than its predecessor, it was clearly suggested by Marlowe’s ‘Edward II.’  Throughout its exposition of the leading theme—the development and collapse of the weak king’s character—Shakespeare’s historical tragedy closely imitates Marlowe’s.  Shakespeare drew the facts from Holinshed, but his embellishments are numerous, and include the magnificently eloquent eulogy of England which is set in the mouth of John of Gaunt.

Acknowledgments to Marlowe.

In ‘As you like it’ (III. v. 80) Shakespeare parenthetically commemorated his acquaintance with, and his general indebtedness to, the elder dramatist by apostrophising him in the lines:

Dead Shepherd! now I find thy saw of might:
‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’

The second line is a quotation from Marlowe’s poem ‘Hero and Leander’ (line 76).  In the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ (III. i. 17-21) Shakespeare places in the mouth of Sir Hugh Evans snatches of verse from p. 65Marlowe’s charming lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love.’

Between February 1593 and the end of the year the London theatres were closed, owing to the prevalence of the plague, and Shakespeare doubtless travelled with his company in the country.  But his pen was busily employed, and before the close of 1594 he gave marvellous proofs of his rapid powers of production.

‘Titus Andronicus.’

‘Titus Andronicus’ was in his own lifetime claimed for Shakespeare, but Edward Ravenscroft, who prepared a new version in 1678, wrote of it: ‘I have been told by some anciently conversant with the stage that it was not originally his, but brought by a private author to be acted, and he only gave some master-touches to one or two of the principal parts or characters.’  Ravenscroft’s assertion deserves acceptance.  The tragedy, a sanguinary picture of the decadence of Imperial Rome, contains powerful lines and situations, but is far too repulsive in plot and treatment, and too ostentatious in classical allusions, to take rank with Shakespeare’s acknowledged work.  Ben Jonson credits ‘Titus Andronicus’ with a popularity equalling Kyd’s ‘Spanish Tragedy,’ and internal evidence shows that Kyd was capable of writing much of ‘Titus.’  It was suggested by a piece called ‘Titus and Vespasian,’ which Lord Strange’s men played on April 11, 1592; [65] this is only extant in a German version acted by English players in Germany, and published in p. 661620. [66a]  ‘Titus Andronicus’ was obviously taken in hand soon after the production of ‘Titus and Vespasian’ in order to exploit popular interest in the topic.  It was acted by the Earl of Sussex’s men on January 23, 1593-4, when it was described as a new piece; but that it was also acted subsequently by Shakespeare’s company is shown by the title-page of the first extant edition of 1600, which describes it as having been performed by the Earl of Derby’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s servants (successive titles of Shakespeare’s company), as well as by those of the Earls of Pembroke and Sussex.  It was entered on the ‘Stationers’ Register’ to John Danter on February 6, 1594. [66b]  Langbaine claims to have seen an edition of this date, but none earlier than that of 1600 is now known.

‘Merchant of Venice.’

For part of the plot of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ in which two romantic love stories are skilfully blended with a theme of tragic import, Shakespeare had recourse to ‘Il Pecorone,’ a fourteenth-century collection of Italian novels by Ser Giovanni Fiorentino. [66c]  There a Jewish creditor demands a pound of flesh of a defaulting Christian debtor, and the latter is rescued through the advocacy of ‘the lady of Belmont,’ who is wife of the debtor’s friend.  The management of the plot in the p. 67Italian novel is closely followed by Shakespeare.  A similar story is slenderly outlined in the popular medieval collection of anecdotes called ‘Gesta Romanorum,’ while the tale of the caskets, which Shakespeare combined with it in the ‘Merchant,’ is told independently in another portion of the same work.  But Shakespeare’s ‘Merchant’ owes much to other sources, including more than one old play.  Stephen Gosson describes in his ‘Schoole of Abuse’ (1579) a lost play called ‘the Jew . . . showne at the Bull [inn]. . . representing the greedinesse of worldly chusers and bloody mindes of usurers.’  This description suggests that the two stories of the pound of flesh and the caskets had been combined before for purposes of dramatic representation.  The scenes in Shakespeare’s play in which Antonio negotiates with Shylock are roughly anticipated, too, by dialogues between a Jewish creditor Gerontus and a Christian debtor in the extant play of ‘The Three Ladies of London,’ by R[obert] W[ilson], 1584.  There the Jew opens the attack on his Christian debtor with the lines:

Signor Mercatore, why do you not pay me?  Think you I will be mocked in this sort?
This three times you have flouted me—it seems you make thereat a sport.
Truly pay me my money, and that even now presently,
Or by mighty Mahomet, I swear I will forthwith arrest thee.

Subsequently, when the judge is passing judgment in favour of the debtor, the Jew interrupts:

Stay, there, most puissant judge.  Signor Mercatore consider what you do.
Pay me the principal, as for the interest I forgive it you.

Shylock and Roderigo Lopez.

p. 68Above all is it of interest to note that Shakespeare in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ betrays the last definable traces of his discipleship to Marlowe.  Although the delicate comedy which lightens the serious interest of Shakespeare’s play sets it in a wholly different category from that of Marlowe’s ‘Jew of Malta’, the humanised portrait of the Jew Shylock embodies distinct reminiscences of Marlowe’s caricature of the Jew Barabbas.  But Shakespeare soon outpaced his master, and the inspiration that he drew from Marlowe in the ‘Merchant’ touches only the general conception of the central figure.  Doubtless the popular interest aroused by the trial in February 1594 and the execution in June of the Queen’s Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez, incited Shakespeare to a new and subtler study of Jewish character. [68]  For Shylock (not the merchant Antonio) p. 69is the hero of the play, and the main interest culminates in the Jew’s trial and discomfiture.  The bold transition from that solemn scene which trembles on the brink of tragedy to the gently poetic and humorous incidents of the concluding act attests a mastery of stagecraft; but the interest, although it is sustained to the end, is, after Shylock’s final exit, pitched in a lower key.  The ‘Venesyon Comedy,’ which Henslowe, the manager, produced at the Rose on August 25, 1594, was probably the earliest version of ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ and it was revised later.  It was not published till 1600, when two editions appeared, each printed from a different stage copy.

‘King John.’

To 1594 must also be assigned ‘King John,’ which, like the ‘Comedy of Errors’ and ‘Richard II,’ altogether eschews prose.  The piece, which was not printed till 1623, was directly adapted from a worthless play called ‘The Troublesome Raigne of King John’ (1591), which was fraudulently reissued in 1611 as ‘written by W. Sh.,’ and in 1622 as by ‘W. Shakespeare.’  There is very small ground for associating Marlowe’s name with the old play.  Into the adaptation Shakespeare flung all his energy, and the theme grew under his hand into genuine tragedy.  The three chief characters—the mean and cruel king, p. 70the noblehearted and desperately wronged Constance, and the soldierly humourist, Faulconbridge—are in all essentials of his own invention, and are portrayed with the same sureness of touch that marked in Shylock his rapidly maturing strength.  The scene, in which the gentle boy Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered his eyes to be put out, is as affecting as any passage in tragic literature.

‘Comedy of Errors’ in Gray’s Inn Hall.

At the close of 1594 a performance of Shakespeare’s early farce, ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ gave him a passing notoriety that he could well have spared.  The piece was played on the evening of Innocents’ Day (December 28), 1594, in the hall of Gray’s Inn, before a crowded audience of benchers, students, and their friends.  There was some disturbance during the evening on the part of guests from the Inner Temple, who, dissatisfied with the accommodation afforded them, retired in dudgeon.  ‘So that night,’ the contemporary chronicler states, ‘was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and errors, whereupon it was ever afterwards called the “Night of Errors.”’ [70]  Shakespeare was acting on the same day before the Queen at Greenwich, and it is doubtful if he were present.  On the morrow a commission of oyer and terminer inquired into the causes of the tumult, which was attributed to a sorcerer having ‘foisted a company of base and common fellows to p. 71make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions.’

Early plays doubtfully assigned to Shakespeare.

Two plays of uncertain authorship attracted public attention during the period under review (1591-4)—‘Arden of Feversham’ (licensed for publication April 3, 1592, and published in 1592) and ‘Edward III’ (licensed for publication December 1, 1595, and published in 1596).  Shakespeare’s hand has been traced in both, mainly on the ground that their dramatic energy is of a quality not to be discerned in the work of any contemporary whose writings are extant.  There is no external evidence in favour of Shakespeare’s authorship in either case.  ‘Arden of Feversham’ dramatises with intensity and insight a sordid murder of a husband by a wife which took place at Faversham in 1551, and was fully reported by Holinshed.  The subject is of a different type from any which Shakespeare is known to have treated, and although the play may be, as Mr. Swinburne insists, ‘a young man’s work,’ it bears no relation either in topic or style to the work on which young Shakespeare was engaged at a period so early as 1591 or 1592.  ‘Edward III’ is a play in Marlowe’s vein, and has been assigned to Shakespeare on even more shadowy grounds.  Capell reprinted it in his ‘Prolusions’ in 1760, and described it as ‘thought to be writ by Shakespeare.’  Many speeches scattered through the drama, and one whole scene—that in which the Countess of Salisbury repulses the advances of Edward III—show the hand of a master (act ii. sc. ii.)  But there is even in the style of p. 72these contributions much to dissociate them from Shakespeare’s acknowledged productions, and to justify their ascription to some less gifted disciple of Marlowe. [72a]  A line in act ii. sc. i. (‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’) reappears in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ (xciv. l. 14). [72b]  It was contrary to his practice to literally plagiarise himself.  The line in the play was doubtless borrowed from a manuscript copy of the ‘Sonnets.’

‘Mucedorus.’

Two other popular plays of the period, ‘Mucedorus’ and ‘Faire Em,’ have also been assigned to Shakespeare on slighter provocation.  In Charles II.’s library they were bound together in a volume labelled ‘Shakespeare, Vol. I.,’ and bold speculators have occasionally sought to justify the misnomer.

‘Mucedorus,’ an elementary effort in romantic comedy, dates from the early years of Elizabeth’s reign; it was first published, doubtless after undergoing revision, in 1595, and was reissued, ‘amplified with new additions,’ in 1610.  Mr. Payne Collier, who included it in his privately printed edition of Shakespeare in 1878, was confident that a scene interpolated in the 1610 version (in which the King of Valentia laments the supposed loss of his son) displayed genius which Shakespeare alone could compass.  However readily critics may admit the superiority in literary value of the interpolated scene to anything else in the piece, few will accept Mr. Collier’s extravagant estimate.  The scene was probably from p. 73the pen of an admiring but faltering imitator of Shakespeare. [73]

‘Faire Em.’

‘Faire Em,’ although not published till 1631, was acted by Shakespeare’s company while Lord Strange was its patron, and some lines from it are quoted for purposes of ridicule by Robert Greene in his ‘Farewell to Folly’ in 1592.  It is another rudimentary endeavour in romantic comedy, and has not even the pretension of ‘Mucedorus’ to one short scene of conspicuous literary merit.

p. 74VI—THE FIRST APPEAL TO THE READING PUBLIC

Publication of ‘Venus and Adonis.’

During the busy years (1591-4) that witnessed his first pronounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came before the public in yet another literary capacity.  On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, the printer, who was his fellow-townsman, obtained a license for the publication of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ a metrical version of a classical tale of love.  It was published a month or two later, without an author’s name on the title-page, but Shakespeare appended his full name to the dedication, which he addressed in conventional style to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton.  The Earl, who was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the handsomest man at Court, with a pronounced disposition to gallantry.  He had vast possessions, was well educated, loved literature, and through life extended to men of letters a generous patronage. [74]  ‘I know not how I shall offend,’ Shakespeare now wrote to him, ‘in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burden. . . .  But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble p. 75a godfather.’  ‘The first heir of my invention’ implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare’s dramatic work.  It is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness, but imbued with a tone of license which may be held either to justify the theory that it was a precocious product of the author’s youth, or to show that Shakespeare was not unready in mature years to write with a view to gratifying a patron’s somewhat lascivious tastes.  The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto from Ovid’s ‘Amores:’ [75a]

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo
Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

The influence of Ovid, who told the story in his ‘Metamorphoses,’ is apparent in many of the details.  But the theme was doubtless first suggested to Shakespeare by a contemporary effort.  Lodge’s ‘Scillaes Metamorphosis,’ which appeared in 1589, is not only written in the same metre (six-line stanzas rhyming a b a b c c), but narrates in the exordium the same incidents in the same spirit.  There is little doubt that Shakespeare drew from Lodge some of his inspiration. [75b]

‘Lucrece.’

p. 76A year after the issue of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ in 1594, Shakespeare published another poem in like vein, but far more mature in temper and execution.  The digression (ll. 939-59) on the destroying power of Time, especially, is in an exalted key of meditation which is not sounded in the earlier poem.  The metre, too, is changed; seven-line stanzas (Chaucer’s rhyme royal, a b a b b c c) take the place of six-line stanzas.  The second poem was entered in the ‘Stationers’ Registers’ on May 9, 1594, under the title of ‘A Booke intitled the Ravyshement of Lucrece,’ and was published in the same year under the title ‘Lucrece.’  Richard Field printed it, and John Harrison published and sold it at the sign of the White Greyhound in St. Paul’s Churchyard.  The classical story of Lucretia’s ravishment and suicide is briefly recorded in Ovid’s ‘Fasti,’ but Chaucer had retold it in his ‘Legend of Good Women,’ and Shakespeare must have read it there.  Again, in topic and metre, the poem reflected a contemporary poet’s work.  Samuel Daniel’s p. 77‘Complaint of Rosamond,’ with its seven-line stanza (1592), stood to ‘Lucrece’ in even closer relation than Lodge’s ‘Scilla,’ with its six-line stanza, to ‘Venus and Adonis.’  The pathetic accents of Shakespeare’s heroine are those of Daniel’s heroine purified and glorified. [77a]  The passage on Time is elaborated from one in Watson’s ‘Passionate Centurie of Love’ (No. lxxvii.) [77b]  Shakespeare dedicated his second volume of poetry to the Earl of Southampton, the patron of his first.  He addressed him in terms of devoted friendship, which were not uncommon at the time in communications between patrons and poets, but suggest that Shakespeare’s relations with the brilliant young nobleman had grown closer since p. 78he dedicated ‘Venus and Adonis’ to him in colder language a year before.  ‘The love I dedicate to your lordship,’ Shakespeare wrote in the opening pages of ‘Lucrece,’ ‘is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. . .  What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.’

Enthusiastic reception of the poems.

In these poems Shakespeare made his earliest appeal to the world of readers, and the reading public welcomed his addresses with unqualified enthusiasm.  The London playgoer already knew Shakespeare’s name as that of a promising actor and playwright, but his dramatic efforts had hitherto been consigned in manuscript, as soon as the theatrical representation ceased, to the coffers of their owner, the playhouse manager.  His early plays brought him at the outset little reputation as a man of letters.  It was not as the myriad-minded dramatist, but in the restricted role of adapter for English readers of familiar Ovidian fables, that he first impressed a wide circle of his contemporaries with the fact of his mighty genius.  The perfect sweetness of the verse, and the poetical imagery in ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’ practically silenced censure of the licentious treatment of the themes on the part of the seriously minded.  Critics vied with each other in the exuberance of the eulogies in which they proclaimed that the fortunate author had gained a place in permanence on the summit of Parnassus.  ‘Lucrece,’ wrote Michael Drayton in his ‘Legend of Matilda’ (1594), was ‘revived to live another age.’  In p. 791595 William Clerke in his ‘Polimanteia’ gave ‘all praise’ to ‘sweet Shakespeare’ for his ‘Lucrecia.’  John Weever, in a sonnet addressed to ‘honey-tongued Shakespeare’ in his ‘Epigramms’ (1595), eulogised the two poems as an unmatchable achievement, although he mentioned the plays ‘Romeo’ and ‘Richard’ and ‘more whose names I know not.’  Richard Carew at the same time classed him with Marlowe as deserving the praises of an English Catullus. [79]  Printers and publishers of the poems strained their resources to satisfy the demands of eager purchasers.  No fewer than seven editions of ‘Venus’ appeared between 1594 and 1602; an eighth followed in 1617.  ‘Lucrece’ achieved a fifth edition in the year of Shakespeare’s death.

Shakespeare and Spenser.

There is a likelihood, too, that Spenser, the greatest of Shakespeare’s poetic contemporaries, was first drawn by the poems into the ranks of Shakespeare’s admirers.  It is hardly doubtful that Spenser described Shakespeare in ‘Colin Clouts come home againe’ (completed in 1594), under the name of ‘Aetion’—a familiar Greek proper name derived from Αετος, an eagle:

And there, though last not least is Aetion;
  A gentler Shepheard may no where be found,
Whose muse, full of high thought’s invention,
  Doth, like himselfe, heroically sound.

The last line seems to allude to Shakespeare’s surname.  We may assume that the admiration was p. 80mutual.  At any rate Shakespeare acknowledged acquaintance with Spenser’s work in a plain reference to his ‘Teares of the Muses’ (1591) in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (v. i. 52-3).

The thrice three Muses, mourning for the death
Of learning, late deceased in beggary,

is stated to be the theme of one of the dramatic entertainments wherewith it is proposed to celebrate Theseus’s marriage.  In Spenser’s ‘Teares of the Muses’ each of the Nine laments in turn her declining influence on the literary and dramatic effort of the age.  Theseus dismisses the suggestion with the not inappropriate comment:

That is some satire keen and critical,
Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

But there is no ground for assuming that Spenser in the same poem referred figuratively to Shakespeare when he made Thalia deplore the recent death of ‘our pleasant Willy.’ [80]  The name Willy was frequently used in contemporary literature as a term of familiarity without relation to the baptismal name of the person referred to.  Sir Philip Sidney was p. 81addressed as ‘Willy’ by some of his elegists.  A comic actor, ‘dead of late’ in a literal sense, was clearly intended by Spenser, and there is no reason to dispute the view of an early seventeenth-century commentator that Spenser was paying a tribute to the loss English comedy had lately sustained by the death of the comedian, Richard Tarleton. [81a]  Similarly the ‘gentle spirit’ who is described by Spenser in a later stanza as sitting ‘in idle cell’ rather than turn his pen to base uses cannot be reasonably identified with Shakespeare. [81b]

Patrons at court.

Meanwhile Shakespeare was gaining personal esteem outside the circles of actors and men of letters.  His genius and ‘civil demeanour’ of which Chettle wrote arrested the notice not only of Southampton but of other noble patrons of literature and the drama.  His summons to act at Court with the most famous actors of the day at the Christmas of 1594 was possibly due in part to personal interest in himself.  Elizabeth quickly showed him special favour.  Until the end of her reign his plays were repeatedly acted in her presence.  The revised version of ‘Love’s Labour’s p. 82Lost’ was given at Whitehall at Christmas 1597, and tradition credits the Queen with unconcealed enthusiasm for Falstaff, who came into being a little later.  Under Elizabeth’s successor he greatly strengthened his hold on royal favour, but Ben Jonson claimed that the Queen’s appreciation equalled that of James I.  When Jonson wrote in his elegy on Shakespeare of

Those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James,

he was mindful of many representations of Shakespeare’s plays by the poet and his fellow-actors at the palaces of Whitehall, Richmond, or Greenwich during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign.

p. 83VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY

The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.

It was doubtless to Shakespeare’s personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence.  In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century.  In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent.  Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy.  But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney’s collection of sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour.  For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney’s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. [83]  p. 84Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love.  Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron’s ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height.

Shakespeare’s first experiments.

Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career.  Three well-turned examples figure in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape.  It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ which prefaced in 1591 Florio’s ‘Second Frutes,’ a series of Italian-English dialogues for students. [84]

Majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets composed in 1594.

p. 85But these were sporadic efforts.  It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman’s patronage for his earliest publication, ‘Venus and Adonis,’ that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale.  Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and thirty-first years.  His occasional reference in the sonnets to his growing age was a conventional device—traceable to Petrarch—of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of p. 86no literal interpretation. [86]  In matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not much more than thirty.  Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts occasionally p. 87and at irregular intervals during the nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in 1603.  But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594 be allotted with confidence.  Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is made to Queen Elizabeth’s death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and a final act of homage on Shakespeare’s part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.  All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height.

Their literary value.

In literary value Shakespeare’s sonnets are notably unequal.  Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry.  The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power.  On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits.  In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare’s sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery.  In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early dramatic efforts as ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’  There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in ‘Venus and Adonis’ or in ‘Lucrece,’ although p. 88occasional utterances of Shakespeare’s Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them.  The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.

Circulation in manuscript.

In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript. [88]  But their reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his p. 89unreadiness to give them publicity.  A line from one of them:

Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14), [89a]

was quoted in the play of ‘Edward III,’ which was probably written before 1595.  Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare’s ‘sugred [89b] sonnets among his private friends,’ and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems.  William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in his ‘Passionate Pilgrim.’

Their piratical publication in 1609.  ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’

At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surreptitiously sent to press.  Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publishing army.  He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors’ control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without p. 90reference to the author’s wishes.  Thorpe’s career as a procurer of neglected ‘copy’ had begun well.  He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe’s translation of the ‘First Book of Lucan.’  On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the publication of ‘Shakespeares Sonnets,’ and this tradesman-like form of title figured not only on the ‘Stationers’ Company’s Registers,’ but on the title-page.  Thorpe employed George Eld to print the manuscript, and two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, to distribute it to the public.  On half the edition Aspley’s name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright.  The book was issued in June, [90] and the owner of the ‘copy’ left the public under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his own pen.  The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher’s (instead of from the author’s) pen was, unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication.  Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands.  Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright.  He p. 91cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe’s collection of his sonnets in 1609.  With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas (the metre of ‘Lucrece’) entitled ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth.  The poem, in a gentle Spenserian vein, has no connection with the ‘Sonnets.’  If, as is possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early days.

Thomas Thorpe and ‘Mr. W. H.’

A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe’s preface and his part in the publication has led many critics into a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s poems. [91]  Thorpe’s dedication was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to him.  He advertised Shakespeare as ‘our ever-living poet.’  As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture p. 92a partner in the speculation, ‘Mr. W. H.’  In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternity,’ such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse.  When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe’s ‘First Book of Lucan’ in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade.  ‘W. H.’ was doubtless in a like position.  He is best identified with a stationer’s assistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring ‘copy.’  In 1606 ‘W. H.’ won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials.  In that year ‘W. H.’ announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem—‘A Foure-fould Meditation’—by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed ‘W. H.’) vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove.  When Thorpe dubbed ‘Mr. W. H.,’ with characteristic magniloquence, ‘the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,’ he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare’s sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue.  In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave Hall’s initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends.  Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to render it probable that the p. 93printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers.

The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ‘Mr. W. H.,’ a young nobleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe’s efforts were confined. [93]  There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe’s methods of business.  His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely by his mercantile interests.  He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare’s private life.  Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued p. 94his calling.  It was wholly outside Thorpe’s aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with any cryptic significance.

No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials ‘Mr. W. H.’  Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been recklessly assumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. [94]  But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’  The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols ‘Mr. W. H.’  In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles.  Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions.  Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility.  Any further consideration of Thorpe’s address to ‘Mr. W. H.’ belongs to the p. 95biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the scope of Shakespeare’s biography. [95a]

The form of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects their master.  Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French.  They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. [95b]  p. 96A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem.  As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more.  The collection of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas.  The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe’s edition opens the volume.

Want of continuity.  The two ‘groups.’

It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written.  Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. [96]  It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were p. 97addressed to a woman.  This division cannot be literally justified.  In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the kind.  Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.)  A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or ‘benefit of ill’ (cxix.)  The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first ‘group,’ does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy. [97]  And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.)  Similarly, the sonnets in the second ‘group’ (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription.  Six invoke no person at all.  No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals.  No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust.  No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in p. 98octosyllabics, like Lyly’s song of ‘Cupid and Campaspe,’ and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly’s songs.  No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man.  Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid’s fire. [98]

Main topics of the first ‘group.’

The choice and succession of topics in each ‘group’ give to neither genuine cohesion.  In the first ‘group’ the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the poet’s appeal to a young man to marry so that his youth and beauty may survive in children.  There is almost a contradiction in terms between the poet’s handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend’s youth and accomplishments.  The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. ci. cvii.)  These alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet’s affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.)  There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.)  At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet’s mistress in the poet’s absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.)  In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom p. 99the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass’d by the ambush of young days,
Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d!

At times melancholy overwhelms the writer: he despairs of the corruptions of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his profession of acting (cxi. cxii.), and foretells his approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.)  Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet’s verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.)  But in one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.)  In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.)

Main topics of the second ‘group.’

In two sonnets of the second ‘group’ (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes.  In twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his ‘dark’ mistress for her proud disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other men.  Apparently continuing a theme of the first ‘group,’ the poet rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.)  Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.) p. 100or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxx.-vi.)  In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ‘group’ lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.

It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems in 1609.  There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light.  When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640—thirty-one years after their first appearance—they were presented in a completely different order.  The short descriptive titles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.

Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets.  Their dependence on French and Italian models.

In whatever order Shakespeare’s sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can only be accepted with many qualifications.  Elizabethan sonnets were commonly the artificial products of the poet’s fancy.  A strain of personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made.  The typical collection p. 101of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative studies.  Echoes of the French or of the Italian sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant notes.  The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves.  Daniel’s fine sonnet (xlix.) on ‘Care-charmer, sleep,’ although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Brach [101a] apostrophising ‘le sommeil chasse-soin’ (in the collection entitled ‘Les Amours d’Aymée’), or the sonnet of Philippe Desportes invoking ‘Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire’ (in the collection entitled ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’). [101b]  But, throughout Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French effort is unmistakable. [101c]  Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of ‘an English Petrarch’—the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. [101d]  Thomas Watson in 1582, in his p. 102collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled ‘ΈΚΑΤΟΜΠΑΘΙΑ, or A Passionate Century of Love,’ prefaced each poem, which he termed a ‘passion,’ with a prose note of its origin and intention.  Watson frankly informed his readers that one ‘passion’ was ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch;’ that in another passion ‘he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard;’ while ‘the sense or matter of “a third” was taken out of Serafino in his “Strambotti.”’  In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his p. 103foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation. [103a]  Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled ‘Idea,’ declared that it was ‘a fault too common in this latter time’ ‘to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch’s pen.’ [103b]  Lodge did not acknowledge his borrowings more specifically than his colleagues, but he made a plain profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: ‘Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody’s hand.’ [103c]  Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called ‘Licia’ (1593) simulated the varying p. 104moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all written in ‘imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’  Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources in the Italian sonnets not merely of Petrarch, but of the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro. [104a]  The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France.  Daniel followed Maurice Sève [104b] in christening his collection ‘Delia;’ Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ‘Diana;’ while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ‘amours,’ but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux, [104c] although it was employed by other French contemporaries.

Sonnetteers’ admission of insincerity.

With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as

‘[Men] that do dictionary’s method bring
Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;
[Men] that poor Petrarch’s long deceasèd woes
With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.’

p. 105Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments.  But ‘even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey in ‘Pierces Supererogation’ in 1593, ‘are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.’  Drayton’s sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare’s in quality than those of any contemporary.  Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled ‘Idea’ [105] (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere.  ‘In all humours sportively he ranged,’ he declared.  Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ‘Licia, or Poems of Love,’ with the warning, ‘Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . .  Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of p. 106husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.’ [106a]

Contemporary censure of sonnetteers’ false sentiment.  ‘Gulling Sonnets.’

The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of ‘the pangs of despised love’ or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism.  The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected writers of the day.  In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet-sequence in his ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid.’ [106b]  Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled ‘A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,’ appealed to his literary comrades to abandon ‘the painted cabinet’ of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth.  But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies.  In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton’s ‘Idea’), he inveighed against the ‘bastard sonnets’ which ‘base rhymers’ ‘daily’ begot ‘to their own shames and poetry’s disgrace.’  In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen series of nine ‘gulling sonnets’ p. 107or parodies of the conventional efforts. [107a]  Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies’s condemnation.  Sir John is especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth ‘gulling sonnet,’ in which he ridicules the application of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.; [107b] while Davies’s Sonnet ix., beginning:

‘To love, my lord, I do knight’s service owe’

must have parodied Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxvi., beginning:

‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,’ etc. [107c]

Shakespeare’s scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.

Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays.  ‘Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,’ exclaims Biron in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (IV. iii. 158).  In the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:

You must lay lime to tangle her desires
By wailful sonnets whose composèd rime
p. 108Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .
Say that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench.  Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.’ [108]  In later plays Shakespeare’s disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced.  In ‘Henry V’ (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, ‘I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: “Wonder of nature!”’  The Duke of Orleans retorts: ‘I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.’  The Dauphin replies: ‘Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.’  In ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ (V. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’  Benedick jestingly promises one so ‘in high a style that no man living shall come over it.’  Subsequently (V. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.

p. 109VIII—THE BORROWED CONCEITS OF THE SONNETS

Slender autobiographical element in Shakespeare’s sonnets.  The imitative element.

At a first glance a far larger proportion of Shakespeare’s sonnets give the reader the illusion of personal confessions than those of any contemporary, but when allowance has been made for the current conventions of Elizabethan sonnetteering, as well as for Shakespeare’s unapproached affluence in dramatic instinct and invention—an affluence which enabled him to identify himself with every phase of emotion—the autobiographic element in his sonnets, although it may not be dismissed altogether, is seen to shrink to slender proportions.  As soon as the collection is studied comparatively with the many thousand sonnets that the printing presses of England, France, and Italy poured forth during the last years of the sixteenth century, a vast number of Shakespeare’s performances prove to be little more than professional trials of skill, often of superlative merit, to which he deemed himself challenged by the efforts of contemporary practitioners.  The thoughts and words of the sonnets of Daniel, Drayton, Watson, Barnabe Barnes, Constable, and Sidney were assimilated by Shakespeare in his poems as consciously and p. 110with as little compunction as the plays and novels of contemporaries in his dramatic work.  To Drayton he was especially indebted. [110]  Such resemblances as are visible between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of Petrarch or Desportes seem due to his study of the English imitators of those sonnetteers.  Most of p. 111Ronsard’s nine hundred sonnets and many of his numerous odes were accessible to Shakespeare in English adaptations, but there are a few signs that Shakespeare had recourse to Ronsard direct.

Adapted or imitated conceits are scattered over the whole of Shakespeare’s collection.  They are usually manipulated with consummate skill, but Shakespeare’s indebtedness is not thereby obscured.  Shakespeare in many beautiful sonnets describes spring and summer, night and sleep and their influence on amorous emotion.  Such topics are common themes of the poetry of the Renaissance, and they figure in Shakespeare’s pages clad in the identical livery that clothed them in the sonnets of Petrarch, Ronsard, De Baïf, and Desportes, or of English disciples of the Italian and French masters. [111]  In p. 112Sonnet xxiv. Shakespeare develops Ronsard’s conceit that his love’s portrait is painted on his heart; and in Sonnet cxxii. he repeats something of Ronsard’s phraseology in describing how his friend, who has just made him a gift of ‘tables,’ is ‘character’d’ in his brain. [112a]  Sonnet xcix., which reproaches the flowers with stealing their charms from the features of his love, is adapted from Constable’s sonnet to Diana (No. ix.), and may be matched in other collections.  Elsewhere Shakespeare meditates on the theory that man is an amalgam of the four elements, earth, water, air, and fire (xl.-xlv.) [112b]  In all these he reproduces, with such embellishments as his genius dictated, phrases and sentiments of Daniel, Drayton, Barnes, and Watson, who imported them direct from France and Italy.  In two or three instances Shakespeare showed his reader that he was engaged in a mere literary exercise by offering him alternative renderings of the same conventional conceit.  In Sonnets xlvi. and xlvii. he paraphrases twice over—appropriating many of Watson’s words—the unexhilarating notion that the eye and heart are in perpetual dispute as to which has the greater influence on p. 113lovers. [113a]  In the concluding sonnets, cliii. and cliv., he gives alternative versions of an apologue illustrating the potency of love which first figured in the Greek anthology, had been translated into Latin, and subsequently won the notice of English, French, and Italian sonnetteers. [113b]

Shakespeare’s claims of immortality for his sonnets a borrowed conceit.

In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was so certain of immortality that it was capable of immortalising the person to whom it was addressed, he gave voice to no conviction that was peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of spirit, or spontaneous p. 114ebullition of feeling.  He was merely proving that he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a theme that Ronsard and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe. [114a]  Sir Philip Sidney, in his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595) wrote that it was the common habit of poets to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. [114b]  ‘Men of great calling,’ Nash wrote in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse,’ 1593, ‘take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets.’ [114c]  In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ‘eternising’ faculty of their p. 115verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic.  Spenser wrote in his ‘Amoretti’ (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)

My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.

Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration.  Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ‘my immortal song’ (Idea, vi. 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes’ (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such lines as:

While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (Idea xliv. 1).
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (ib. xliv. 11).
My name shall mount unto eternity (ib. xliv. 14).
All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 54).

Daniel was no less explicit

This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9).
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,
Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10).
These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time’s consuming rage (ib. l. 9-12).

Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman.

Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste.  Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet: [115]

p. 116Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; [116]
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
  So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
  You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses p. 117to a woman.  In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name of Will with a lady’s ‘will’ (the synonym in Elizabethan English of both ‘lust’ and ‘obstinacy’), he derisively challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress’s ‘wills,’ and had turned the word ‘grace’ to the same punning account as Shakespeare p. 118turned the word ‘will.’ [118a]  Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red . . .
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, [118b]

he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses’ features.

The praise of ‘blackness.’

In two sonnets (cxxvii. and cxxxii.) Shakespeare amiably notices the black complexion, hair, and eyes of his mistress, and expresses a preference for features of that hue over those of the fair hue which was, he tells us, more often associated in poetry with beauty.  He commends the ‘dark lady’ for refusing to practise those arts by which other women of the day gave their hair and faces colours denied them by Nature.  Here Shakespeare repeats almost verbatim his own lines in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’(IV. iii. 241-7), where the heroine Rosaline is described as ‘black as ebony,’ with ‘brows decked in black,’ and in ‘mourning’ for p. 119her fashionable sisters’ indulgence in the disguising arts of the toilet.  ‘No face is fair that is not full so black,’ exclaims Rosaline’s lover.  But neither in the sonnets nor in the play can Shakespeare’s praise of ‘blackness’ claim the merit of being his own invention.  Sir Philip Sidney, in sonnet vii. of his ‘Astrophel and Stella,’ had anticipated it.  The ‘beams’ of the eyes of Sidney’s mistress were ‘wrapt in colour black’ and wore ‘this mourning weed,’ so

That whereas black seems beauty’s contrary,
She even in black doth make all beauties flow. [119a]

To his praise of ‘blackness’ in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Shakespeare appends a playful but caustic comment on the paradox that he detects in the conceit. [119b]  Similarly, the sonnets, in which a dark complexion is pronounced to be a mark of beauty, are followed by others in which the poet argues in self-confutation that blackness of feature is hideous in a woman, and invariably indicates moral turpitude or blackness of heart.  Twice, in much the same language as had already served a like purpose in the play, does p. 120he mock his ‘dark lady’ with this uncomplimentary interpretation of dark-coloured hair and eyes.

The sonnets of vituperation.

The two sonnets, in which this view of ‘blackness’ is developed, form part of a series of twelve, which belongs to a special category of sonnetteering effort.  In them Shakespeare abandons the sugared sentiment which characterises most of his hundred and forty-two remaining sonnets.  He grows vituperative and pours a volley of passionate abuse upon a woman whom he represents as disdaining his advances.  The genuine anguish of a rejected lover often expresses itself in curses both loud and deep, but the mood of blinding wrath which the rejection of a lovesuit may rouse in a passionate nature does not seem from the internal evidence to be reflected genuinely in Shakespeare’s sonnets of vituperation.  It was inherent in Shakespeare’s genius that he should import more dramatic intensity than any other poet into sonnets of a vituperative type; but there is also in his vituperative sonnets a declamatory parade of figurative extravagance which suggests that the emotion is feigned and that the poet is striking an attitude.  He cannot have been in earnest in seeking to conciliate his disdainful mistress—a result at which the vituperative sonnets purport to aim—when he tells her that she is ‘black as hell, as dark as night,’ and with ‘so foul a face’ is ‘the bay where all men ride.’

Gabriel Harvey’s ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet.’

But external evidence is more conclusive as to the artificial construction of the vituperative sonnets.  Again a comparison of this series with the efforts of the modish sonnetteers assigns to it its true character.  p. 121Every sonnetteer of the sixteenth century, at some point in his career, devoted his energies to vituperation of a cruel siren.  Ronsard in his sonnets celebrated in language quite as furious as Shakespeare’s a ‘fierce tigress,’ a ‘murderess,’ a ‘Medusa.’  Barnabe Barnes affected to contend in his sonnets with a female ‘tyrant,’ a ‘Medusa,’ a ‘rock.’  ‘Women’ (Barnes laments) ‘are by nature proud as devils.’  The monotonous and artificial regularity with which the sonnetteers sounded the vituperative stop, whenever they had exhausted their notes of adulation, excited ridicule in both England and France.  In Shakespeare’s early life the convention was wittily parodied by Gabriel Harvey in ‘An Amorous Odious sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid, or both or neither, or what shall please the looving or hating reader, either in sport or earnest, to make of such contrary passions as are here discoursed.’ [121]  After extolling the beauty and virtue of his mistress above that of Aretino’s Angelica, Petrarch’s Laura, Catullus’s Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as ‘a serpent in brood,’ ‘a poisonous toad,’ ‘a heart of marble,’ and ‘a stony mind as passionless as a block.’  Finally he tells her,

If ever there were she-devils incarnate,
They are altogether in thee incorporate.

Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours.’

In France Etienne Jodelle, a professional p. 122sonnetteer although he is best known as a dramatist, made late in the second half of the sixteenth century an independent endeavour of like kind to stifle by means of parody the vogue of the vituperative sonnet.  Jodelle designed a collection of three hundred sonnets which he inscribed to ‘hate of a woman,’ and he appropriately entitled them ‘Contr’ Amours’ in distinction from ‘Amours,’ the term applied to sonnets in the honeyed vein.  Only seven of Jodelle’s ‘Contr’ Amours’ are extant, but there is sufficient identity of tone between them and Shakespeare’s vituperative efforts almost to discover in Shakespeare’s invectives a spark of Jodelle’s satiric fire. [122]  The dark lady p. 123of Shakespeare’s ‘sonnets’ may therefore be relegated to the ranks of the creatures of his fancy.  It is quite possible that he may have met in real life a dark-complexioned siren, and it is possible that he may have fared ill at her disdainful hands.  But no such incident is needed to account for the presence of ‘the dark lady’ in the sonnets.  It was the exacting conventions of the sonnetteering contagion, and not his personal experiences or emotions, that impelled Shakespeare to give ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets a poetic being. [123]  She has been compared, not very justly, with Shakespeare’s splendid creation of Cleopatra in his play of p. 124‘Antony and Cleopatra.’  From one point of view the same criticism may be passed on both.  There is no greater and no less ground for seeking in Shakespeare’s personal environment the original of ‘the dark lady’ of his sonnets than for seeking there the original of his Queen of Egypt.

p. 125IX—THE PATRONAGE OF THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON

Biographic fact in the ‘dedicatory’ sonnets.

Amid the borrowed conceits and poetic figures of Shakespeare’s sonnets there lurk suggestive references to the circumstances in his external life that attended their composition.  If few can be safely regarded as autobiographic revelations of sentiment, many of them offer evidence of the relations in which he stood to a patron, and to the position that he sought to fill in the circle of that patron’s literary retainers.  Twenty sonnets, which may for purposes of exposition be entitled ‘dedicatory’ sonnets, are addressed to one who is declared without periphrasis and without disguise to be a patron of the poet’s verse (Nos. xxiii., xxvi., xxxii., xxxvii., xxxviii., lxix., lxxvii.-lxxxvi., c., ci., cvi.)  In one of these—Sonnet lxxviii.—Shakespeare asserted:

So oft have I invoked thee for my Muse
And found such fair assistance in my verse
As every alien pen hath got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse.

Subsequently he regretfully pointed out how his patron’s readiness to accept the homage of other p. 126poets seemed to be thrusting him from the enviable place of pre-eminence in his patron’s esteem.

The Earl of Southampton the poet’s sole patron.

Shakespeare’s biographer is under an obligation to attempt an identification of the persons whose relations with the poet are defined so explicitly.  The problem presented by the patron is simple.  Shakespeare states unequivocally that he has no patron but one.

Sing [sc. O Muse!] to the ear that doth thy lays esteem,
And gives thy pen both skill and argument (c. 7-8).
For to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell (ciii. 11-12).

The Earl of Southampton, the patron of his narrative poems, is the only patron of Shakespeare that is known to biographical research.  No contemporary document or tradition gives the faintest suggestion that Shakespeare was the friend or dependent of any other man of rank.  A trustworthy tradition corroborates the testimony respecting Shakespeare’s close intimacy with the Earl that is given in the dedicatory epistles of his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’, penned respectively in 1593 and 1594.  According to Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first adequate biographer, ‘there is one instance so singular in its magnificence of this patron of Shakespeare’s that if I had not been assured that the story was handed down by Sir William D’Avenant, who was probably very well acquainted with his affairs, I should not venture to have inserted; that my Lord Southampton at one time gave him a thousand pounds to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a p. 127mind to.  A bounty very great and very rare at any time.’

There is no difficulty in detecting the lineaments of the Earl of Southampton in those of the man who is distinctively greeted in the sonnets as the poet’s patron.  Three of the twenty ‘dedicatory’ sonnets merely translate into the language of poetry the expressions of devotion which had already done duty in the dedicatory epistle in prose that prefaces ‘Lucrece.’  That epistle to Southampton runs:

The love [127] I dedicate to your lordship is without end; whereof this pamphlet, without beginning, is but a superfluous moiety.  The warrant I have of your honourable disposition, not the worth of my untutored lines, makes it assured of acceptance.  What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours.  Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater; meantime, as it is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life, still lengthened with all happiness.

Your lordship’s in all duty,
William Shakespeare.

Sonnet xxvi. is a gorgeous rendering of these sentences:—

p. 128Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect
  Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
  Till then not show my head where thou may’st prove me. [128]

The ‘Lucrece’ epistle’s intimation that the patron’s love alone gives value to the poet’s ‘untutored lines’ is repeated in Sonnet xxxii., which doubtless reflected a moment of depression:

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripp’d by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
p. 129O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
‘Had my friend’s Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,
To march in ranks of better equipage; [129]
  But since he died and poets better prove,
  Theirs for their style I’ll read, his for his love.’

A like vein is pursued in greater exaltation of spirit in Sonnet xxxviii.:

How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who’s so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
  If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
  The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

The central conceit here so finely developed—that the patron may claim as his own handiwork the protégé’s verse because he inspires it—belongs to the most conventional schemes of dedicatory adulation.  When Daniel, in 1592, inscribed his volume of sonnets p. 130entitled ‘Delia’ to the Countess of Pembroke, he played in the prefatory sonnet on the same note, and used in the concluding couplet almost the same words as Shakespeare.  Daniel wrote:

Great patroness of these my humble rhymes,
Which thou from out thy greatness dost inspire . . .
O leave [i.e. cease] not still to grace thy work in me . . .
Whereof the travail I may challenge mine,
But yet the glory, madam, must be thine.

Elsewhere in the Sonnets we hear fainter echoes of the ‘Lucrece’ epistle.  Repeatedly does the sonnetteer renew the assurance given there that his patron is ‘part of all’ he has or is.  Frequently do we meet in the Sonnets with such expressions as these:—

[I] by a part of all your glory live (xxxvii. 12);
Thou art all the better part of me (xxxix. 2);
My spirit is thine, the better part of me (lxxiv. 8);

while ‘the love without end’ which Shakespeare had vowed to Southampton in the light of day reappears in sonnets addressed to the youth as ‘eternal love’ (cviii. 9), and a devotion ‘what shall have no end’ (cx. 9).

Rivals in Southampton’s favour.

The identification of the rival poets whose ‘richly compiled’ ‘comments’ of his patron’s ‘praise’ excited Shakespeare’s jealousy is a more difficult inquiry than the identification of the patron.  The rival poets with their ‘precious phrase by all the Muses filed’ (lxxxv. 4) must be sought among the writers who eulogised Southampton and are known to have shared his patronage.  The field of choice is not small.  Southampton from boyhood cultivated literature and the society of p. 131literary men.  In 1594 no nobleman received so abundant a measure of adulation from the contemporary world of letters. [131a]  Thomas Nash justly described the Earl, when dedicating to him his ‘Life of Jack Wilton’ in 1594, as ‘a dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.’  Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets.  The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton’s countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare’s with admiration for his personal charm.  Similarly John Florio, the Earl’s Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned among Shakespeare’s literary acquaintances, [131b] wrote to Southampton in 1598, in his dedicatory epistle before his ‘Worlde of Wordes’ (an Italian-English dictionary), ‘as to me and many more, the glorious and gracious sunshine of your honour hath infused light and life.’

Shakespeare’s fear of a rival poet.

Shakespeare magnanimously and modestly described that protégé of Southampton, whom he deemed a specially dangerous rival, as an ‘able’ and a ‘better’ ‘spirit,’ ‘a worthier pen,’ a vessel of ‘tall building and of goodly pride,’ compared with whom he was himself ‘a worthless boat.’  He detected a touch of magic in the man’s writing.  His ‘spirit,’ Shakespeare hyperbolically declared, had been ‘by spirits taught to write p. 132above a mortal pitch,’ and ‘an affable familiar ghost’ nightly gulled him with intelligence.  Shakespeare’s dismay at the fascination exerted on his patron by ‘the proud full sail of his [rival’s] great verse’ sealed for a time, he declared, the springs of his own invention (lxxxvi.)

Barnabe Barnes probably the rival.

There is no need to insist too curiously on the justice of Shakespeare’s laudation of the other poet’s’ powers.  He was presumably a new-comer in the literary field who surprised older men of benevolent tendency into admiration by his promise rather than by his achievement.  ‘Eloquence and courtesy,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey at the time, ‘are ever bountiful in the amplifying vein;’ and writers of amiability, Harvey adds, habitually blazoned the perfections that they hoped to see their young friends achieve, in language implying that they had already achieved them.  All the conditions of the problem are satisfied by the rival’s identification with the young poet and scholar Barnabe Barnes, a poetic panegyrist of Southampton and a prolific sonnetteer, who was deemed by contemporary critics certain to prove a great poet.  His first collection of sonnets, ‘Parthenophil and Parthenophe,’ with many odes and madrigals interspersed, was printed in 1593; and his second, ‘A Centurie of Spiritual Sonnets,’ in 1595.  Loud applause greeted the first book, which included numerous adaptations from the classical, Italian, and French poets, and disclosed, among many crudities, some fascinating lyrics and at least one almost perfect sonnet (No. lxvi. ‘Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode?’)  p. 133Thomas Churchyard called Barnes ‘Petrarch’s scholar;’ the learned Gabriel Harvey bade him ‘go forward in maturity as he had begun in pregnancy,’ and ‘be the gallant poet, like Spenser;’ Campion judged his verse to be ‘heady and strong.’  In a sonnet that Barnes addressed in this earliest volume to the ‘virtuous’ Earl of Southampton he declared that his patron’s eyes were ‘the heavenly lamps that give the Muses light,’ and that his sole ambition was ‘by flight to rise’ to a height worthy of his patron’s ‘virtues.’  Shakespeare sorrowfully pointed out in Sonnet lxxviii. that his lord’s eyes

        that taught the dumb on high to sing,
And heavy ignorance aloft to fly,
Have added feathers to the learned’s wing,
And given grace a double majesty;

while in the following sonnet he asserted that the ‘worthier pen’ of his dreaded rival when lending his patron ‘virtue’ was guilty of plagiarism, for he ‘stole that word’ from his patron’s ‘behaviour.’  The emphasis laid by Barnes on the inspiration that he sought from Southampton’s ‘gracious eyes’ on the one hand, and his reiterated references to his patron’s ‘virtue’ on the other, suggest that Shakespeare in these sonnets directly alluded to Barnes as his chief competitor in the hotly contested race for Southampton’s favour.  In Sonnet lxxxv. Shakespeare declares that ‘he cries Amen to every hymn that able spirit [i.e. his rival] affords.’  Very few poets of the day in England followed Ronsard’s practice of bestowing the title of hymn on miscellaneous poems, but Barnes twice applies p. 134the word to his poems of love. [134a]  When, too, Shakespeare in Sonnet lxxx. employs nautical metaphors to indicate the relations of himself and his rival with his patron—

My saucy bark inferior far to his . . .
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,

he seems to write with an eye on Barnes’s identical choice of metaphor:

My fancy’s ship tossed here and there by these [sc. sorrow’s floods]
Still floats in danger ranging to and fro.
How fears my thoughts’ swift pinnace thine hard rock! [134b]

Other theories as to the rival’s identity.

Gervase Markham is equally emphatic in his sonnet to Southampton on the potent influence of his patron’s ‘eyes,’ which, he says, crown ‘the most victorious pen’—a possible reference to Shakespeare.  Nash’s poetic praises of the Earl are no less enthusiastic, and are of a finer literary temper than Markham’s.  But Shakespeare’s description of his rival’s literary work fits far less closely the verse of Markham and Nash than the verse of their fellow aspirant Barnes.

Many critics argue that the numbing fear of his rival’s genius and of its influence on his patron to which Shakespeare confessed in the sonnets was more likely to be evoked by the work of George Chapman than by that of any other contemporary poet.  But Chapman had produced no conspicuously ‘great verse’ till he began his translation of Homer in 1598; and although he appended in 1610 to a complete p. 135edition of his translation a sonnet to Southampton, it was couched in the coldest terms of formality, and it was one of a series of sixteen sonnets each addressed to a distinguished nobleman with whom the writer implies that he had no previous relations. [135]  Drayton, p. 136Ben Jonson, and Marston have also been identified by various critics with ‘the rival poet,’ but none of these shared Southampton’s bounty, nor are the terms which Shakespeare applies to his rival’s verse specially applicable to the productions of any of them.

Sonnets of friendship.

Many besides the ‘dedicatory’ sonnets are addressed to a handsome youth of wealth and rank, for whom the poet avows ‘love,’ in the Elizabethan sense of friendship. [136]  Although no specific reference is made outside the twenty ‘dedicatory’ sonnets to the youth as a literary patron, and the clues to his identity are elsewhere vaguer, there is good ground for the conclusion that the sonnets of disinterested love or friendship also have Southampton for their subject.  The sincerity of the poet’s sentiment is often open to doubt in these poems, but they seem to illustrate a real intimacy subsisting between Shakespeare and a young Mæcenas.

p. 137Extravagances of literary compliment.

Extravagant compliment—‘gross painting’ Shakespeare calls it—was more conspicuous in the intercourse of patron and client during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign than in any other epoch.  For this result the sovereign herself was in part responsible.  Contemporary schemes of literary compliment seemed infected by the feigned accents of amorous passion and false rhapsodies on her physical beauty with which men of letters servilely sought to satisfy the old Queen’s incurable greed of flattery. [137]  Sir p. 138Philip Sidney described with admirable point the adulatory excesses to which less exalted patrons were habituated by literary dependents.  He gave the warning that as soon as a man showed interest in poetry or its producers, poets straightway pronounced him ‘to be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all.’  ‘You shall dwell upon superlatives . . .  Your soule shall be placed with Dante’s Beatrice.’ [138a]  The warmth of colouring which distinguishes many of the sonnets that Shakespeare, under the guise of disinterested friendship, addressed to the youth can be matched at nearly all points in the adulation that patrons were in the habit of receiving from literary dependents in the style that Sidney described. [138b]

p. 139Patrons habitually addressed in affectionate terms.

Shakespeare assured his friend that he could never grow old (civ.), that the finest types of beauty and chivalry in mediæval romance lived again in him (cvi.), that absence from him was misery, and that his affection for him was unalterable.  Hundreds of poets openly p. 140gave the like assurances to their patrons.  Southampton was only one of a crowd of Mæcenases whose panegyrists, writing without concealment in their own names, credited them with every perfection of mind and body, and ‘placed them,’ in Sidney’s apt phrase, ‘with Dante’s “Beatrice.”’

Illustrations of the practice abound.  Matthew Roydon wrote of his patron, Sir Philip Sidney:

His personage seemed most divine,
A thousand graces one might count
Upon his lovely cheerful eyne.
To heare him speak and sweetly smile
You were in Paradise the while.

Edmund Spenser in a fine sonnet told his patron, Admiral Lord Charles Howard, that ‘his good personage and noble deeds’ made him the pattern to the present age of the old heroes of whom ‘the antique poets’ were ‘wont so much to sing.’  This compliment, which Shakespeare turns to splendid account in Sonnet cvi., recurs constantly in contemporary sonnets of adulation. [140a]  Ben Jonson apostrophised the Earl of Desmond as ‘my best-best lov’d.’  Campion told Lord Walden, the Earl of Suffolk’s undistinguished heir, that although his muse sought to express his love, ‘the admired virtues’ of the patron’s youth

Bred such despairing to his daunted Muse
That it could scarcely utter naked truth. [140b]

p. 141Dr. John Donne includes among his ‘Verse Letters’ to patrons and patronesses several sonnets of similar temper, one of which, acknowledging a letter of news from a patron abroad, concludes thus:

And now thy alms is given, thy letter’s read,
The body risen again, the which was dead,
And thy poor starveling bountifully fed.
After this banquet my soul doth say grace,
And praise thee for it and zealously embrace
Thy love, though I think thy love in this case
To be as gluttons’, which say ‘midst their meat
They love that best of which they most do eat. [141]

The tone of yearning for a man’s affection is sounded by Donne and Campion almost as plaintively in their sonnets to patrons as it was sounded by Shakespeare.  There is nothing, therefore, in the vocabulary of affection which Shakespeare employed in his sonnets of friendship to conflict with the theory that they were inscribed to a literary patron with whom his intimacy was of the kind normally subsisting at the time between literary clients and their patrons.

Direct references to Southampton in the sonnets of friendship.

We know Shakespeare had only one literary patron, the Earl of Southampton, and the view that that nobleman is the hero of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ is strongly corroborated by such definite details as can be deduced from the vague eulogies in those poems of the youth’s gifts and graces.  Every compliment, in fact, paid by Shakespeare to the youth, whether it be p. 142vaguely or definitely phrased, applies to Southampton without the least straining of the words.  In real life beauty, birth, wealth, and wit sat ‘crowned’ in the Earl, whom poets acclaimed the handsomest of Elizabethan courtiers, as plainly as in the hero of the poet’s verse.  Southampton has left in his correspondence ample proofs of his literary learning and taste, and, like the hero of the sonnets, was ‘as fair in knowledge as in hue.’  The opening sequence of seventeen sonnets, in which a youth of rank and wealth is admonished to marry and beget a son so that ‘his fair house’ may not fall into decay, can only have been addressed to a young peer like Southampton, who was as yet unmarried, had vast possessions, and was the sole male representative of his family.  The sonnetteer’s exclamation, ‘You had a father, let your son say so,’ had pertinence to Southampton at any period between his father’s death in his boyhood and the close of his bachelorhood in 1598.  To no other peer of the day are the words exactly applicable.  The ‘lascivious comment’ on his ‘wanton sport’ which pursues the young friend through the sonnets, and is so adroitly contrived as to add point to the picture of his fascinating youth and beauty, obviously associates itself with the reputation for sensual indulgence that Southampton acquired both at Court and, according to Nash, among men of letters. [142]

His youthfulness.

There is no force in the objection that the young man of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ must have p. 143been another than Southampton because the terms in which he is often addressed imply extreme youth.  In 1594, a date to which I refer most of the sonnets Southampton was barely twenty-one, and the young man had obviously reached manhood.  In Sonnet civ. Shakespeare notes that the first meeting between him and his friend took place three years before that poem was written, so that, if the words are to be taken literally, the poet may have at times embodied reminiscences of Southampton when he was only seventeen or eighteen. [143a]  But Shakespeare, already worn in worldly experience, passed his thirtieth birthday in 1594, and he probably tended, when on the threshold of middle life, to exaggerate the youthfulness of the nobleman almost ten years his junior, who even later impressed his acquaintances by his boyish appearance and disposition. [143b]  ‘Young’ was the epithet invariably applied to Southampton by all who knew anything of him even when he was twenty-eight.  In 1601 Sir Robert Cecil referred to him as the ‘poor young Earl.’

The evidence of portraits.

But the most striking evidence of the identity of the p. 144youth of the sonnets of ‘friendship’ with Southampton is found in the likeness of feature and complexion which characterises the poet’s description of the youth’s outward appearance and the extant pictures of Southampton as a young man.  Shakespeare’s many references to his youth’s ‘painted counterfeit’ (xvi., xxiv., xlvii., lxvii.) suggest that his hero often sat for his portrait.  Southampton’s countenance survives in probably more canvases than that of any of his contemporaries.  At least fourteen extant portraits have been identified on good authority—nine paintings, three miniatures (two by Peter Oliver and one by Isaac Oliver), and two contemporary prints. [144]  Most of these, it is true, p. 145portray their subject in middle age, when the roses of youth had faded, and they contribute nothing to the present argument.  But the two portraits that are now at Welbeck, the property of the Duke of Portland, give all the information that can be desired of Southampton’s aspect ‘in his youthful morn.’ [145]  One of these pictures represents the Earl at twenty-one, and the other at twenty-five or twenty-six.  The earlier portrait, which is reproduced on the opposite page, shows a young man resplendently attired.  His doublet is of white satin; a broad collar, edged with lace, half covers a pointed gorget of red leather, embroidered with silver thread; the white trunks and knee-breeches are laced with gold; the sword-belt, embroidered in red and gold, is decorated at intervals with white silk bows; the hilt of the rapier is overlaid with gold; purple garters, embroidered in silver thread, fasten the white stockings below the knee.  Light body armour, richly damascened, lies on the ground to the right of the figure; and a white-plumed helmet stands to the left on a table covered with a cloth of purple velvet embroidered in gold.  Such gorgeous raiment suggests that its wearer bestowed much attention on his personal equipment.  But the head is more interesting than the body.  The eyes are blue, the cheeks pink, the complexion clear, and the expression sedate; rings are in the ears; beard and moustache are at an incipient stage, and are of the same, bright auburn hue as the hair in a picture of Southampton’s mother p. 146that is also at Welbeck. [146a]  But, however scanty is the down on the youth’s cheek, the hair on his head is luxuriant.  It is worn very long, and falls over and below the shoulder.  The colour is now of walnut, but was originally of lighter tint.

The portrait depicting Southampton five or six years later shows him in prison, to which he was committed after his secret marriage in 1598.  A cat and a book in a jewelled binding are on a desk at his right hand.  Here the hair falls over both his shoulders in even greater profusion, and is distinctly blonde.  The beard and thin upturned moustache are of brighter auburn and fuller than before, although still slight.  The blue eyes and colouring of the cheeks show signs of ill-health, but differ little from those features in the earlier portrait.

From either of the two Welbeck portraits of Southampton might Shakespeare have drawn his picture of the youth in the Sonnets.  Many times does he tell us that the youth is fair in complexion, and that his eyes are fair.  In Sonnet lxviii., when he points to the youth’s face as a map of what beauty was ‘without all ornament, itself and true’—before fashion sanctioned the use of artificial ‘golden tresses’—there can be little doubt that he had in mind the wealth of locks that fell about Southampton’s neck. [146b]

p. 147Sonnet cvii. the last of the series.

A few only of the sonnets that Shakespeare addressed to the youth can be allotted to a date subsequent to 1594; only two bear on the surface signs of a later composition.  In Sonnet lxx. the poet no longer credits his hero with juvenile wantonness, but with a ‘pure, unstained prime,’ which has ‘passed by the ambush of young days.’  Sonnet cvii., apparently the last of the series, was penned almost a decade after the mass of its companions, for it makes references that cannot be mistaken to three events that took place in 1603—to Queen Elizabeth’s death, to the accession of James I, and to the release of the Earl of Southampton, who had been in prison since he was convicted in 1601 of complicity in the rebellion of the Earl of Essex.  The first two events are thus described:

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Allusion to Elizabeth’s death.

It is in almost identical phrase that every pen in the spring of 1603 was felicitating the nation on the unexpected turn of events, by which Elizabeth’s crown had passed, without civil war, to the Scottish King, and thus the revolution that had been foretold as the inevitable p. 148consequence of Elizabeth’s demise was happily averted.  Cynthia (i.e. the moon) was the Queen’s recognised poetic appellation.  It is thus that she figures in the verse of Barnfield, Spenser, Fulke Greville, and Ralegh, and her elegists involuntarily followed the same fashion.  ‘Fair Cynthia’s dead’ sang one.

Luna’s extinct; and now beholde the sunne
Whose beames soake up the moysture of all teares,

wrote Henry Petowe in his ‘A Fewe Aprill Drops Showered on the Hearse of Dead Eliza,’ 1603.  There was hardly a verse-writer who mourned her loss that did not typify it, moreover, as the eclipse of a heavenly body.  One poet asserted that death ‘veiled her glory in a cloud of night.’  Another argued: ‘Naught can eclipse her light, but that her star will shine in darkest night.’  A third varied the formula thus:

  When winter had cast off her weed
Our sun eclipsed did set.  Oh! light most fair. [148a]

At the same time James was constantly said to have entered on his inheritance ‘not with an olive branch in his hand, but with a whole forest of olives round about him, for he brought not peace to this kingdom alone’ but to all Europe. [148b]

Allusions to Southampton’s release from prison.

‘The drops of this most balmy time,’ in this same sonnet, cvii., is an echo of another current strain of fancy.  James came to England in a springtide of rarely rivalled clemency, which was reckoned of the p. 149happiest augury.  ‘All things look fresh,’ one poet sang, ‘to greet his excellence.’  ‘The air, the seasons, and the earth’ were represented as in sympathy with the general joy in ‘this sweetest of all sweet springs.’  One source of grief alone was acknowledged: Southampton was still a prisoner in the Tower, ‘supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.’  All men, wrote Manningham, the diarist, on the day following the Queen’s death, wished him at liberty. [149a]  The wish was fulfilled quickly.  On April 10, 1603, his prison gates were opened by ‘a warrant from the king.’  So bountiful a beginning of the new era, wrote John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton two days later, ‘raised all men’s spirits . . . and the very poets with their idle pamphlets promised themselves’ great things. [149b]  Samuel Daniel and John Davies celebrated Southampton’s release in buoyant verse. [149c]  It is improbable that Shakespeare remained silent.  ‘My love looks fresh,’ he wrote in the concluding lines of Sonnet cvii., and he repeated the conventional promise that he had so often made before, that his friend should live in his ‘poor rhyme,’ ‘when tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.’  It is impossible to resist the inference that Shakespeare thus saluted his patron on the close of his days of tribulation.  Shakespeare’s genius had then won for him a public reputation that rendered him independent of any private patron’s p. 150favour, and he made no further reference in his writings to the patronage that Southampton had extended to him in earlier years.  But the terms in which he greeted his former protector for the last time in verse justify the belief that, during his remaining thirteen years of life, the poet cultivated friendly relations with the Earl of Southampton, and was mindful to the last of the encouragement that the young peer offered him while he was still on the threshold of the temple of fame.

p. 151X—THE SUPPOSED STORY OF INTRIGUE IN THE SONNETS

It is hardly possible to doubt that had Shakespeare, who was more prolific in invention than any other poet, poured out in his sonnets his personal passions and emotions, he would have been carried by his imagination, at every stage, far beyond the beaten tracks of the conventional sonnetteers of his day.  The imitative element in his sonnets is large enough to refute the assertion that in them as a whole he sought to ‘unlock his heart.’  It is likely enough that beneath all the conventional adulation bestowed by Shakespeare on Southampton there lay a genuine affection, but his sonnets to the Earl were no involuntary ebullitions of a devoted and disinterested friendship; they were celebrations of a patron’s favour in the terminology—often raised by Shakespeare’s genius to the loftiest heights of poetry—that was invariably consecrated to such a purpose by a current literary convention.  Very few of Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ have a substantial right to be regarded as untutored cries of the soul.  It is true that the sonnets in which the writer reproaches himself with sin, or gives expression to a p. 152sense of melancholy, offer at times a convincing illusion of autobiographic confessions; and it is just possible that they stand apart from the rest, and reveal the writer’s inner consciousness, in which case they are not to be matched in any other of Shakespeare’s literary compositions.  But they may be, on the other hand, merely literary meditations, conceived by the greatest of dramatists, on infirmities incident to all human nature, and only attempted after the cue had been given by rival sonnetteers.  At any rate, their energetic lines are often adapted from the less forcible and less coherent utterances of contemporary poets, and the themes are common to almost all Elizabethan collections of sonnets. [152]  Shakespeare’s noble sonnet on the ravages of lust (cxxix.), for example, treats with marvellous force and insight a stereotyped theme of sonnetteers, p. 153and it may have owed its whole existence to Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet on ‘Desire.’ [153a]

The youth’s relations with the poet’s mistress.

Only in one group, composed of six sonnets scattered through the collection, is there traceable a strand of wholly original sentiment, not to be readily defined and boldly projecting from the web into which it is wrought.  This series of six sonnets deals with a love adventure of no normal type.  Sonnet cxliv. opens with the lines:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair
Which like two angels do suggest (i.e. tempt) me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill. [153b]

The woman, the sonnetteer continues, has corrupted the man and has drawn him from his ‘side.’  Five other sonnets treat the same theme.  In three addressed to the man (xl., xli., and xlii.) the poet mildly reproaches his youthful friend for having sought and won the favours of a woman whom he himself loved ‘dearly,’ but the trespass is forgiven on account of the friend’s youth and p. 154beauty.  In the two remaining sonnets Shakespeare addresses the woman (cxxxiii. and cxxxiv.), and he rebukes her for having enslaved not only himself but ‘his next self’—his friend.  Shakespeare, in his denunciation elsewhere of a mistress’s disdain of his advances, assigns her blindness, like all the professional sonnetteers, to no better defined cause than the perversity and depravity of womankind.  In these six sonnets alone does he categorically assign his mistress’s alienation to the fascinations of a dear friend or hint at such a cause for his mistress’s infidelity.  The definite element of intrigue that is developed here is not found anywhere else in the range of Elizabethan sonnet-literature.  The character of the innovation and its treatment seem only capable of explanation by regarding the topic as a reflection of Shakespeare’s personal experience.  But how far he is sincere in his accounts of his sorrow in yielding his mistress to his friend in order to retain the friendship of the latter must be decided by each reader for himself.  If all the words be taken literally, there is disclosed an act of self-sacrifice that it is difficult to parallel or explain.  But it remains very doubtful if the affair does not rightly belong to the annals of gallantry.  The sonnetteer’s complacent condonation of the young man’s offence chiefly suggests the deference that was essential to the maintenance by a dependent of peaceful relations with a self-willed and self-indulgent patron.  Southampton’s sportive and lascivious temperament might easily impel him to divert to himself the attention of an attractive woman by whom he saw that his poet was fascinated, p. 155and he was unlikely to tolerate any outspoken protest on the part of his protégé.  There is no clue to the lady’s identity, and speculation on the topic is useless.  She may have given Shakespeare hints for his pictures of the ‘dark lady,’ but he treats that lady’s obduracy conventionally, and his vituperation of her sheds no light on the personal history of the mistress who left him for his friend.

‘Willobie his Avisa.’

The emotions roused in Shakespeare by the episode, even if potent at the moment, were not likely to be deep-seated or enduring.  And it is possible that a half-jesting reference, which would deprive Shakespeare’s amorous adventure of serious import, was made to it by a literary comrade in a poem that was licensed for publication on September 3, 1594, and was published immediately under the title of ‘Willobie his Avisa, or the True Picture of a Modest Maid and of a Chaste and Constant Wife.’ [155]  In this volume, which mainly consists of seventy-two cantos in varying numbers of six-line stanzas, the chaste heroine, Avisa, holds converse—in the opening section as a maid, and in the later section as a wife—with a series of passionate adorers.  In every case she firmly repulses their advances.  Midway through the book its alleged author—Henry Willobie—is introduced in his own person as an ardent admirer, and the last twenty-nine of the cantos rehearse his woes and Avisa’s obduracy.  To this section there is p. 156prefixed an argument in prose (canto xliv.)  It is there stated that Willobie, ‘being suddenly affected with the contagion of a fantastical wit at the first sight of Avisa, pineth a while in secret grief.  At length, not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humour, [he] bewrayeth the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W. S., who not long before had tried the courtesy of the like passion and was now newly recovered of the like infection.  Yet [W. S.], finding his friend let blood in the same vein, took pleasure for a time to see him bleed, and instead of stopping the issue, he enlargeth the wound with the sharp razor of willing conceit,’ encouraging Willobie to believe that Avisa would ultimately yield ‘with pains, diligence, and some cost in time.’  ‘The miserable comforter’ [W. S.], the passage continues, was moved to comfort his friend ‘with an impossibility,’ for one of two reasons.  Either ‘he now would secretly laugh at his friend’s folly’ because he ‘had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own.’  Or ‘he would see whether another could play his part better than himself, and, in viewing after the course of this loving comedy,’ would ‘see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor than it did for the old player.  But at length this comedy was like to have grown to a tragedy by the weak and feeble estate that H. W. was brought unto,’ owing to Avisa’s unflinching rectitude.  Happily, ‘time and necessity’ effected a cure.  In two succeeding cantos in verse W. S. is introduced in dialogue with Willobie, and he gives him, in oratio recta, light-hearted and mocking counsel p. 157which Willobie accepts with results disastrous to his mental health.

Identity of initials, on which the theory of Shakespeare’s identity with H. W.’s unfeeling adviser mainly rests, is not a strong foundation, [157] and doubt is justifiable as to whether the story of ‘Avisa’ and her lovers is not fictitious.  In a preface signed Hadrian Dorell, the writer, after mentioning that the alleged author (Willobie) was dead, discusses somewhat enigmatically whether or no the work is ‘a poetical fiction.’  In a new edition of 1596 the same editor decides the question in the affirmative.  But Dorell, while making this admission, leaves untouched the curious episode of ‘W. S.’  The mention of ‘W. S.’ as ‘the old player,’ and the employment of theatrical imagery in discussing his relations with Willobie, must be coupled with the fact that Shakespeare, at a date when mentions of him in print were rare, was eulogised by name as the author of ‘Lucrece’ in some prefatory verses to the volume.  From such considerations the theory of ‘W. S.’s’ identity with Willobie’s acquaintance acquires substance.  If we assume that it was Shakespeare who took a roguish delight in watching his friend Willobie suffer the disdain of ‘chaste Avisa’ because he had ‘newly recovered’ from the effects of p. 158a like experience, it is clear that the theft of Shakespeare’s mistress by another friend did not cause him deep or lasting distress.  The allusions that were presumably made to the episode by the author of ‘Avisa’ bring it, in fact, nearer the confines of comedy than of tragedy.

Summary of conclusions respecting the sonnets.

The processes of construction which are discernible in Shakespeare’s sonnets are thus seen to be identical with those that are discernible in the rest of his literary work.  They present one more proof of his punctilious regard for the demands of public taste, and of his marvellous genius and skill in adapting and transmuting for his own purposes the labours of other workers in the field that for the moment engaged his attention.  Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were produced in 1594 under the incitement of that freakish rage for sonnetteering which, taking its rise in Italy and sweeping over France on its way to England, absorbed for some half-dozen years in this country a greater volume of literary energy than has been applied to sonnetteering within the same space of time here or elsewhere before or since.  The thousands of sonnets that were circulated in England between 1591 and 1597 were of every literary quality, from sublimity to inanity, and they illustrated in form and topic every known phase of sonnetteering activity.  Shakespeare’s collection, which was put together at haphazard and published surreptitiously many years after the poems were written, was a medley, at times reaching heights of literary excellence that none p. 159other scaled, but as a whole reflecting the varied features of the sonnetteering vogue.  Apostrophes to metaphysical abstractions, vivid picturings of the beauties of nature, adulation of a patron, idealisation of a protégé’s regard for a nobleman in the figurative language of amorous passion, amiable compliments on a woman’s hair or touch on the virginals, and vehement denunciation of the falseness and frailty of womankind—all appear as frequently in contemporary collections of sonnets as in Shakespeare’s.  He borrows very many of his competitors’ words and thoughts, but he so fused them with his fancy as often to transfigure them.  Genuine emotion or the writer’s personal experience very rarely inspired the Elizabethan sonnet, and Shakespeare’s sonnets proved no exception to the rule.  A personal note may have escaped him involuntarily in the sonnets in which he gives voice to a sense of melancholy and self-remorse, but his dramatic instinct never slept, and there is no proof that he is doing more in those sonnets than produce dramatically the illusion of a personal confession.  Only in one scattered series of six sonnets, where he introduced a topic, unknown to other sonnetteers, of a lover’s supersession by his friend in a mistress’s graces, does he seem to show independence of his comrades and draw directly on an incident in his own life, but even there the emotion is wanting in seriousness.  The sole biographical inference deducible from the sonnets is that at one time in his career Shakespeare disdained no weapon of flattery in an endeavour to monopolise the bountiful patronage of a young man of rank.  External evidence agrees with p. 160internal evidence in identifying the belauded patron with the Earl of Southampton, and the real value to a biographer of Shakespeare’s sonnets is the corroboration they offer of the ancient tradition that the Earl of Southampton, to whom his two narrative poems were openly dedicated, gave Shakespeare at an early period of his literary career help and encouragement, which entitles the Earl to a place in the poet’s biography resembling that filled by the Duke Alfonso d’Este in the biography of Ariosto, or like that filled by Margaret, duchess of Savoy, in the biography of Ronsard.

p. 161XI—THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC POWER

‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

But, all the while that Shakespeare was fancifully assuring his patron

[How] to no other pass my verses tend
Than of your graces and your gifts to tell,

his dramatic work was steadily advancing.  To the winter season of 1595 probably belongs ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ [161]  The comedy may well have been written to celebrate a marriage—perhaps the marriage of the universal patroness of poets, Lucy Harington, to Edward Russell, third earl of Bedford, on December 12, 1594; or that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, at Greenwich on January 24, 1594-5.  The elaborate compliment to the Queen, ‘a fair vestal throned by the west’ (II. i. 157 seq.), was at once an acknowledgment of past marks of royal favour and an invitation for their extension to the future.  Oberon’s fanciful description (II. ii. 148-68) of the spot where he saw the little western flower called ‘Love-in-idleness’ that he bids Puck fetch for him, has been interpreted as a reminiscence of one of the scenic pageants with p. 162which the Earl of Leicester entertained Queen Elizabeth on her visit to Kenilworth in 1575. [162]  The whole play is in the airiest and most graceful vein of comedy.  Hints for the story can be traced to a variety of sources—to Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale,’ to Plutarch’s ‘Life of Theseus,’ to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (bk. iv.), and to the story of Oberon, the fairy-king, in the French mediæval romance of ‘Huon of Bordeaux,’ of which an English translation by Lord Berners was first printed in 1534.  The influence of John Lyly is perceptible in the raillery in which both mortals and immortals indulge.  In the humorous presentation of the play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ by the ‘rude mechanicals’ of Athens, Shakespeare improved upon a theme which he had already employed in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost.’  But the final scheme of the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is of the author’s freshest invention, and by endowing—practically for the first time in literature—the phantoms of the fairy world with a genuine and a sustained dramatic interest, Shakespeare may be said to have conquered a new realm for art.

‘All’s Well.’

More sombre topics engaged him in the comedy of ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which may be tentatively assigned to 1595.  Meres, writing three years later, attributed to Shakespeare a piece called ‘Love’s Labour’s Won.’  This title, which is not otherwise known, may well be applied p. 163to ‘All’s Well.’  ‘The Taming of The Shrew,’ which has also been identified with ‘Love’s Labour’s Won,’ has far slighter claim to the designation.  The plot of ‘All’s Well,’ like that of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ was drawn from Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’ (No. xxxviii.)  The original source is Boccaccio’s ‘Decamerone’ (giorn. iii. nov. 9).  Shakespeare, after his wont, grafted on the touching story of Helena’s love for the unworthy Bertram the comic characters of the braggart Parolles, the pompous Lafeu, and a clown (Lavache) less witty than his compeers.  Another original creation, Bertram’s mother, Countess of Roussillon, is a charming portrait of old age.  In frequency of rhyme and other metrical characteristics the piece closely resembles ‘The Two Gentlemen,’ but the characterisation betrays far greater power, and there are fewer conceits or crudities of style.  The pathetic element predominates.  The heroine Helena, whose ‘pangs of despised love’ are expressed with touching tenderness, ranks with the greatest of Shakespeare’s female creations.

‘Taming of the Shrew.’

‘The Taming of The Shrew’—which, like ‘All’s Well,’ was first printed in the folio—was probably composed soon after the completion of that solemn comedy.  It is a revision of an old play on lines somewhat differing from those which Shakespeare had followed previously.  From ‘The Taming of A Shrew,’ a comedy first published in 1594, [163] Shakespeare drew the Induction and the scenes in which the hero Petruchio p. 164conquers Catherine the Shrew.  He first infused into them the genuine spirit of comedy.  But while following the old play in its general outlines, Shakespeare’s revised version added an entirely new underplot—the story of Bianca and her lovers, which owes something to the ‘Supposes’ of George Gascoigne, an adaptation of Ariosto’s comedy called ‘I Suppositi.’  Evidence of style—the liberal introduction of tags of Latin and the exceptional beat of the doggerel—makes it difficult to allot the Bianca scenes to Shakespeare; those scenes were probably due to a coadjutor.

Stratford allusions in the Induction.

The Induction to ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ has a direct bearing on Shakespeare’s biography, for the poet admits into it a number of literal references to Stratford and his native county.  Such personalities are rare in Shakespeare’s plays, and can only be paralleled in two of slightly later date—the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ and the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor.’  All these local allusions may well be attributed to such a renewal of Shakespeare’s personal relations with the town, as is indicated by external facts in his history of the same period.  In the Induction the tinker, Christopher Sly, describes himself as ‘Old Sly’s son of Burton Heath.’  Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of Shakespeare’s aunt, Edmund Lambert’s wife, and of her sons.  The tinker in like vein confesses that he has run up a score with Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot. [164]  The references p. 165to Wincot and the Hackets are singularly precise.  The name of the maid of the inn is given as Cicely Hacket, and the alehouse is described in the stage direction as ‘on a heath.’

Wincot.

Wincot was the familiar designation of three small Warwickshire villages, and a good claim has been set up on behalf of each to be the scene of Sly’s drunken exploits.  There is a very small hamlet named Wincot within four miles of Stratford now consisting of a single farmhouse which was once an Elizabethan mansion; it is situated on what was doubtless in Shakespeare’s day, before the land there was enclosed, an open heath.  This Wincot forms part of the parish of Quinton, where, according to the parochial registers, a Hacket family resided in Shakespeare’s day.  On November 21, 1591, ‘Sara Hacket, the daughter of Robert Hacket,’ was baptised in Quinton church. [165]  Yet by Warwickshire contemporaries the Wincot of ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ was unhesitatingly identified with Wilnecote, near Tamworth, on the Staffordshire border of Warwickshire, at some distance from Stratford.  That p. 166village, whose name was pronounced ‘Wincot,’ was celebrated for its ale in the seventeenth century, a distinction which is not shown by contemporary evidence to have belonged to any place of like name.  The Warwickshire poet, Sir Aston Cokain, within half a century of the production of Shakespeare’s ‘Taming of The Shrew,’ addressed to ‘Mr. Clement Fisher of Wincott’ (a well-known resident at Wilnecote) verses which begin

Shakspeare your Wincot ale hath much renowned,
That fox’d a Beggar so (by chance was found
Sleeping) that there needed not many a word
To make him to believe he was a Lord.

In the succeeding lines the writer promises to visit ‘Wincot’ (i.e. Wilnecote) to drink

          Such ale as Shakspeare fancies
Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances.

It is therefore probable that Shakespeare consciously invested the home of Kit Sly and of Kit’s hostess with characteristics of Wilnecote as well as of the hamlet near Stratford.

Wilmcote, the native place of Shakespeare’s mother, is also said to have been popularly pronounced ‘Wincot.’  A tradition which was first recorded by Capell as late as 1780 in his notes to the ‘Taming of The Shrew’ (p. 26) is to the effect that Shakespeare often visited an inn at ‘Wincot’ to enjoy the society of a ‘fool who belonged to a neighbouring mill,’ and the Wincot of this story is, we are told, locally associated with the village of Wilmcote.  But the links p. 167that connect Shakespeare’s tinker with Wilmcote are far slighter than those which connect him with Wincot and Wilnecote.

The mention of Kit Sly’s tavern comrades—

Stephen Sly and old John Naps of Greece,
And Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell—

was in all likelihood a reminiscence of contemporary Warwickshire life as literal as the name of the hamlet where the drunkard dwelt.  There was a genuine Stephen Sly who was in the dramatist’s day a self-assertive citizen of Stratford; and ‘Greece,’ whence ‘old John Naps’ derived his cognomen, is an obvious misreading of Greet, a hamlet by Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, not far removed from Shakespeare’s native town.

‘Henry IV.’

In 1597 Shakespeare turned once more to English history.  From Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle,’ and from a valueless but very popular piece, ‘The Famous Victories of Henry V,’ which was repeatedly acted between 1588 and 1595, [167] he worked up with splendid energy two plays on the reign of Henry IV.  They form one continuous whole, but are known respectively as parts i. and ii. of ‘Henry IV.’  The ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ is almost as rich as the Induction to ‘The Taming of The Shrew’ in direct references to persons and districts familiar to Shakespeare.  Two amusing scenes pass at the house of Justice Shallow in Gloucestershire, a county which touched the boundaries of p. 168Stratford (III. ii. and V. i.)  When, in the second of these scenes, the justice’s factotum, Davy, asked his master ‘to countenance William Visor of Woncot [168a] against Clement Perkes of the Hill,’ the local references are unmistakable.  Woodmancote, where the family of Visor or Vizard has flourished since the sixteenth century, is still pronounced Woncot.  The adjoining Stinchcombe Hill (still familiarly known to natives as ‘The Hill’) was in the sixteenth century the home of the family of Perkes.  Very precise too are the allusions to the region of the Cotswold Hills, which were easily accessible from Stratford.  ‘Will Squele, a Cotswold man,’ is noticed as one of Shallow’s friends in youth (III. ii. 23); and when Shallow’s servant Davy receives his master’s instructions to sow ‘the headland’ ‘with red wheat,’ in the early autumn, there is an obvious reference to the custom almost peculiar to the Cotswolds of sowing ‘red lammas’ wheat at an unusually early season of the agricultural year. [168b]

The kingly hero of the two plays of ‘Henry IV’ had figured as a spirited young man in ‘Richard II;’ he was now represented as weighed down by care and age.  With him are contrasted (in part i.) his impetuous and ambitious subject Hotspur and (in p. 169both parts) his son and heir Prince Hal, whose boisterous disposition drives him from Court to seek adventures among the haunters of taverns.  Hotspur is a vivid and fascinating portrait of a hot-headed soldier, courageous to the point of rashness, and sacrificing his life to his impetuous sense of honour.  Prince Hal, despite his vagaries, is endowed by the dramatist with far more self-control and common sense.

Falstaff.

On the first, as on every subsequent, production of ‘Henry IV’ the main public interest was concentrated neither on the King nor on his son, nor on Hotspur, but on the chief of Prince Hal’s riotous companions.  At the outset the propriety of that great creation was questioned on a political or historical ground of doubtful relevance.  Shakespeare in both parts of ‘Henry IV’ originally named the chief of the prince’s associates after Sir John Oldcastle, a character in the old play.  But Henry Brooke, eighth lord Cobham, who succeeded to the title early in 1597, and claimed descent from the historical Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard leader, raised objection; and when the first part of the play was printed by the acting-company’s authority in 1598 (‘newly corrected’ in 1599), Shakespeare bestowed on Prince Hal’s tun-bellied follower the new and deathless name of Falstaff.  A trustworthy edition of the second part of ‘Henry IV’ also appeared with Falstaff’s name substituted for that of Oldcastle in 1600.  There the epilogue expressly denied that Falstaff had any characteristic in common with the martyr Oldcastle.  p. 170Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man.  But the substitution of the name ‘Falstaff’ did not pass without protest.  It hazily recalled Sir John Fastolf, an historical warrior who had already figured in ‘Henry VI’ and was owner at one time of the Boar’s Head Tavern in Southwark; according to traditional stage directions, [170] the prince and his companions in ‘Henry IV’ frequent the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap.  Fuller in his ‘Worthies,’ first published in 1662, while expressing satisfaction that Shakespeare had ‘put out’ of the play Sir John Oldcastle, was eloquent in his avowal of regret that ‘Sir John Fastolf’ was ‘put in,’ on the ground that it was making overbold with a great warrior’s memory to make him a ‘Thrasonical puff and emblem of mock-valour.’

The offending introduction and withdrawal of Oldcastle’s name left a curious mark on literary history.  Humbler dramatists (Munday, Wilson, Drayton, and Hathaway), seeking to profit by the attention drawn by Shakespeare to the historical Oldcastle, produced a poor dramatic version of Oldcastle’s genuine history; and of two editions of ‘Sir John Oldcastle’ published in 1600, one printed for T[homas] P[avier] was impudently described on the title-page as by Shakespeare.

But it is not the historical traditions which are connected with Falstaff that give him his perennial attraction.  It is the personality that owes nothing to history with which Shakespeare’s imaginative p. 171power clothed him.  The knight’s unfettered indulgence in sensual pleasures, his exuberant mendacity, and his love of his own ease are purged of offence by his colossal wit and jollity, while the contrast between his old age and his unreverend way of life supplies that tinge of melancholy which is inseparable from the highest manifestations of humour.  The Elizabethan public recognised the triumphant success of the effort, and many of Falstaff’s telling phrases, with the names of his foils, Justice Shallow and Silence, at once took root in popular speech.  Shakespeare’s purely comic power culminated in Falstaff; he may be claimed as the most humorous figure in literature.

‘Merry Wives of Windsor.’

In all probability ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,’ a comedy inclining to farce, and unqualified by any pathetic interest, followed close upon ‘Henry IV.’  In the epilogue to the ‘Second Part of Henry IV’ Shakespeare had written: ‘If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it . . . where for anything I know Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a’ be killed with your hard opinions.’  Rowe asserts that ‘Queen Elizabeth was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of “Henry IV” that she commanded him to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love.’  Dennis, in the dedication of ‘The Comical Gallant’ (1702), noted that the ‘Merry Wives’ was written at the Queen’s ‘command and by her direction; and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days, and p. 172was afterwards, as tradition tells us, very well pleased with the representation.’  In his ‘Letters’ (1721, p. 232) Dennis reduces the period of composition to ten days—‘a prodigious thing,’ added Gildon, [172a] ‘where all is so well contrived and carried on without the least confusion.’  The localisation of the scene at Windsor, and the complimentary references to Windsor Castle, corroborate the tradition that the comedy was prepared to meet a royal command.  An imperfect draft of the play was printed by Thomas Creede in 1602; [172b] the folio of 1623 first supplied a complete version.  The plot was probably suggested by an Italian novel.  A tale from Straparola’s ‘Notti’ (iv. 4), of which an adaptation figured in the miscellany of novels called Tarleton’s ‘Newes out of Purgatorie’ (1590), another Italian tale from the ‘Pecorone’ of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino (i. 2), and a third romance, the Fishwife’s tale of Brainford in the collection of stories called ‘Westward for Smelts,’ [172c] supply incidents distantly resembling episodes in the play.  Nowhere has Shakespeare so vividly reflected the bluff temper of contemporary middle-class society.  The presentment of the buoyant domestic life of an Elizabethan country town bears distinct impress of Shakespeare’s own experience.  Again, there are literal references to the p. 173neighbourhood of Stratford.  Justice Shallow, whose coat-of-arms is described as consisting of ‘luces,’ is thereby openly identified with Shakespeare’s early foe, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote.  When Shakespeare makes Master Slender repeat the report that Master Page’s fallow greyhound was ‘outrun on Cotsall’ (I. i. 93), he testifies to his interest in the coursing matches for which the Cotswold district was famed.

‘Henry V.’

The spirited character of Prince Hal was peculiarly congenial to its creator, and in ‘Henry V’ Shakespeare, during 1598, brought his career to its close.  The play was performed early in 1599, probably in the newly built Globe Theatre.  Again Thomas Creede printed, in 1600, an imperfect draft, which was thrice reissued before a complete version was supplied in the First Folio of 1623.  The dramatic interest of ‘Henry V’ is slender.  There is abundance of comic element, but death has removed Falstaff, whose last moments are described with the simple pathos that comes of a matchless art, and, though Falstaff’s companions survive, they are thin shadows of his substantial figure.  New comic characters are introduced in the persons of three soldiers respectively of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationality, whose racial traits are contrasted with telling effect.  The irascible Irishman, Captain MacMorris, is the only representative of his nation who figures in the long list of Shakespeare’s dramatis personæ.  The scene in which the pedantic but patriotic Welshman, Fluellen, avenges the sneers of the braggart Pistol at his nation’s emblem, by p. 174forcing him to eat the leek, overflows in vivacious humour.  The piece in its main current presents a series of loosely connected episodes in which the hero’s manliness is displayed as soldier, ruler, and lover.  The topic reached its climax in the victory of the English at Agincourt, which powerfully appealed to patriotic sentiment.  Besides the ‘Famous Victories,’ [174] there was another lost piece on the subject, which Henslowe produced for the first time on November 28, 1595.  ‘Henry V’ may be regarded as Shakespeare’s final experiment in the dramatisation of English history, and it artistically rounds off the series of his ‘histories’ which form collectively a kind of national epic.  For ‘Henry VIII,’ which was produced very late in his career, he was only in part responsible, and that ‘history’ consequently belongs to a different category.

Essex and the rebellion of 1601.

A glimpse of autobiography may be discerned in the direct mention by Shakespeare in ‘Henry V’ of an exciting episode in current history.  In the prologue to act v. Shakespeare foretold for Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, the close friend of his patron Southampton, an enthusiastic reception by the people of London when he should come home after ‘broaching’ rebellion in Ireland.

Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!—(Act v. Chorus, ll. 30-4.)

Essex had set out on his disastrous mission as p. 175the would-be pacificator of Ireland on March 27, 1599.  The fact that Southampton went with him probably accounts for Shakespeare’s avowal of sympathy.  But Essex’s effort failed.  He was charged, soon after ‘Henry V’ was produced, with treasonable neglect of duty, and he sought in 1601, again with the support of Southampton, to recover his position by stirring up rebellion in London.  Then Shakespeare’s reference to Essex’s popularity with Londoners bore perilous fruit.  The friends of the rebel leaders sought the dramatist’s countenance.  They paid 40s. to Augustine Phillips, a leading member of Shakespeare’s company, to induce him to revive at the Globe Theatre ‘Richard II’ (beyond doubt Shakespeare’s play), in the hope that its scene of the killing of a king might encourage a popular outbreak.  Phillips subsequently deposed that he prudently told the conspirators who bespoke the piece that ‘that play of Kyng Richard’ was ‘so old and so long out of use as that they should have small or no company at it.’  None the less the performance took place on Saturday (February 7, 1601), the day preceding that fixed by Essex for the rising.  The Queen, in a later conversation with William Lambarde (on August 4, 1601), complained that ‘this tragedie’ of ‘Richard II,’ which she had always viewed with suspicion, was played at the period with seditious intent ‘forty times in open streets and houses.’ [175]  At the trial of Essex and his friends, Phillips gave evidence of the circumstances under which the tragedy was revived at the p. 176Globe Theatre.  Essex was executed and Southampton was imprisoned until the Queen’s death.  No proceedings were taken against the players, [176a] but Shakespeare wisely abstained, for the time, from any public reference to the fate either of Essex or of his patron Southampton.

Shakespeare’s popularity and influence.

Such incidents served to accentuate Shakespeare’s growing reputation.  For several years his genius as dramatist and poet had been acknowledged by critics and playgoers alike, and his social and professional position had become considerable.  Inside the theatre his influence was supreme.  When, in 1598, the manager of the company rejected Ben Jonson’s first comedy—his ‘Every Man in his Humour’—Shakespeare intervened, according to a credible tradition (reported by Rowe but denounced by Gifford), and procured a reversal of the decision in the interest of the unknown dramatist who was his junior by nine years.  He took a part when the piece was performed.  Jonson was of a difficult and jealous temper, and subsequently he gave vent to an occasional expression of scorn at Shakespeare’s expense, but, despite passing manifestations of his unconquerable surliness, there can be no doubt that Jonson cherished genuine esteem and affection for Shakespeare till death. [176b]  Within a very few years of Shakespeare’s death Sir Nicholas L’Estrange, an p. 177industrious collector of anecdotes, put into writing an anecdote for which he made Dr. Donne responsible, attesting the amicable relations that habitually subsisted between Shakespeare and Jonson.  ‘Shakespeare,’ ran the story, ‘was godfather to one of Ben Jonson’s children, and after the christening, being in a deep study, Jonson came to cheer him up and asked him why he was so melancholy.  “No, faith, Ben,” says he, “not I, but I have been considering a great while what should be the fittest gift for me to bestow upon my godchild, and I have resolv’d at last.”  “I pr’ythee, what?” sayes he.  “I’ faith, Ben, I’ll e’en give him a dozen good Lattin spoons, and thou shalt translate them.”’ [177]

The Mermaid meetings.

The creator of Falstaff could have been no stranger to tavern life, and he doubtless took part with zest in the convivialities of men of letters.  Tradition reports that Shakespeare joined, at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street, those meetings of Jonson and his associates which Beaumont described in his poetical ‘Letter’ to Jonson:

                    ‘What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid? heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.’

p. 178‘Many were the wit-combats,’ wrote Fuller of Shakespeare in his ‘Worthies’ (1662), ‘betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man of war; Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning, solid but slow in his performances.  Shakespear, with the Englishman of war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about, and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention.’

Mere’s eulogy, 1598.

Of the many testimonies paid to Shakespeare’s literary reputation at this period of his career, the most striking was that of Francis Meres.  Meres was a learned graduate of Cambridge University, a divine and schoolmaster, who brought out in 1598 a collection of apophthegms on morals, religion, and literature which he entitled ‘Palladis Tamia.’  In the book he interpolated ‘A comparative discourse of our English poets with the Greek, Latin, and Italian poets,’ and there exhaustively surveyed contemporary literary effort in England.  Shakespeare figured in Meres’s pages as the greatest man of letters of the day.  ‘The Muses would speak Shakespeare’s fine filed phrase,’ Meres asserted, ‘if they could speak English.’  ‘Among the English,’ he declared, ‘he was the most excellent in both kinds for the stage’ (i.e. tragedy and comedy).  The titles of six comedies (‘Two Gentlemen of Verona, ‘Errors,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ ‘Love’s Labour’s Won,’ ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘Merchant of Venice’) and of six tragedies (‘Richard II,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘Henry IV,’ ‘King p. 179John,’ ‘Titus,’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’) were set forth, and mention followed of his ‘Venus and Adonis,’ his ‘Lucrece,’ and his ‘sugred [179] sonnets among his private friends.’  These were cited as proof ‘that the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare.’  In the same year a rival poet, Richard Barnfield, in ‘Poems in divers Humors,’ predicted immortality for Shakespeare with no less confidence.

And Shakespeare, thou whose honey-flowing vein
(Pleasing the world) thy Praises doth obtain,
Whose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste)
Thy name in Fame’s immortal Book have placed,
Live ever you, at least in fame live ever:
Well may the Body die, but Fame dies never.

Value of his name to publishers.

Shakespeare’s name was thenceforth of value to unprincipled publishers, and they sought to palm off on their customers as his work the productions of inferior pens.  As early as 1595, Thomas Creede, the surreptitious printer of ‘Henry V’ and the ‘Merry Wives,’ had issued the crude ‘Tragedie of Locrine, as ‘newly set foorth, overseene and corrected.  By W. S.’  It appropriated many passages from an older piece called ‘Selimus,’ which was possibly by Greene and certainly came p. 180into being long before Shakespeare had written a line of blank verse.  The same initials—‘W.S.’ [180]—figured on the title-page of ‘The True Chronicle Historie of Thomas, Lord Cromwell,’ which was licensed on August 11, 1602, was printed for William Jones in that year, and was reprinted verbatim by Thomas Snodham in 1613.  On the title-page of the comedy entitled ‘The Puritaine, or the Widdow of Watling Streete,’ which George Eld printed in 1607, ‘W.S.’ was again stated to be the author.  Shakespeare’s full name appeared on the title-pages of ‘The Life of Old-castle’ in 1600 (printed for T[homas] P[avier]), of ‘The London Prodigall’ in 1605 (printed by T. C. for Nathaniel Butter), and of ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy’ in 1608 (by R. B. for Thomas Pavier).  None of these six plays have any internal claim to Shakespeare’s authorship; nevertheless all were uncritically included in the third folio of his collected works,(1664).  Schlegel and a few other critics of repute have, on no grounds that merit acceptance, detected signs of Shakespeare’s genuine work in one of the six, ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy;’ it is ‘a coarse, crude, and vigorous p. 181impromptu,’ which is clearly by a far less experienced hand.

The fraudulent practice of crediting Shakespeare with valueless plays from the pens of comparatively dull-witted contemporaries was in vogue among enterprising traders in literature both early and late in the seventeenth century.  The worthless old play on the subject of King John was attributed to Shakespeare in the reissues of 1611 and 1622.  Humphrey Moseley, a reckless publisher of a later period, fraudulently entered on the ‘Stationers’ Register’ on September 9, 1653, two pieces which he represented to be in whole or in part by Shakespeare, viz. ‘The Merry Devill of Edmonton’ and the ‘History of Cardenio,’ a share in which was assigned to Fletcher.  ‘The Merry Devill of Edmonton,’ which was produced on the stage before the close of the sixteenth century, was entered on the ‘Stationers’ Register,’ October 22, 1607, and was first published anonymously in 1608; it is a delightful comedy, abounding in both humour and romantic sentiment; at times it recalls scenes of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’ but no sign of Shakespeare’s workmanship is apparent.  The ‘History of Cardenio’ is not extant. [181]  Francis Kirkman, another active London publisher, who first printed William Rowley’s ‘Birth of Merlin’ in 1662, described it on the title-page as ‘written by William Shakespeare and William Rowley;’ it was reprinted at Halle in a so-called ‘Collection of pseudo-Shakespearean plays’ in 1887.

‘The Passionate Pilgrim.’

But poems no less than plays, in which Shakespeare had no hand, were deceptively placed to his p. 182credit as soon as his fame was established.  In 1599 William Jaggard, a well-known pirate publisher, issued a poetic anthology which he entitled ‘The Passionate Pilgrim, by W. Shakespeare.’  The volume opened with two sonnets by Shakespeare which were not previously in print, and there followed three poems drawn from the already published ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost;’ but the bulk of the volume was by Richard Barnfield and others. [182]  A third edition of the ‘Passionate Pilgrim’ was printed in 1612 with unaltered title-page, although the incorrigible Jaggard had added two new poems which he silently filched from Thomas Heywood’s ‘Troia Britannica.’  Heywood called attention to his own grievance in the dedicatory epistle before his ‘Apology for Actors’ (1612), and he added that Shakespeare resented the more substantial injury which the publisher had done him.  ‘I know,’ wrote Heywood of Shakespeare, ‘[he was] much offended with M. Jaggard that (altogether unknown to him) presumed to make so bold with his name.’  In the result p. 183the publisher seems to have removed Shakespeare’s name from the title-page of a few copies.  This is the only instance on record of a protest on Shakespeare’s part against the many injuries which he suffered at the hands of contemporary publishers.

‘The Phœnix and the Turtle.’

In 1601 Shakespeare’s full name was appended to ‘a poetical essaie on the Phœnix and the Turtle,’ which was published by Edward Blount in an appendix to Robert Chester’s ‘Love’s Martyr, or Rosalins complaint, allegorically shadowing the Truth of Love in the Constant Fate of the Phœnix and Turtle.’  The drift of Chester’s crabbed verse is not clear, nor can the praise of perspicuity be allowed to the appendix to which Shakespeare contributed, together with Marston, Chapman, Ben Jonson, and ‘Ignoto.’  The appendix is introduced by a new title-page running thus: ‘Hereafter follow diverse poeticall Essaies on the former subject, viz: the Turtle and Phœnix.  Done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their names subscribed to their particular workes: never before extant.’  Shakespeare’s alleged contribution consists of thirteen four-lined stanzas in trochaics, each line being of seven syllables, with the rhymes disposed as in Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam.’  The concluding ‘threnos’ is in five three-lined stanzas, also in trochaics, each stanza having a single rhyme.  The poet describes in enigmatic language the obsequies of the Phœnix and the Turtle-dove, who had been united in life by the ties of a purely spiritual love.  The poem may be a mere play of fancy without recondite intention, or it p. 184may be of allegorical import; but whether it bear relation to pending ecclesiastical, political, or metaphysical controversy, or whether it interpret popular grief for the death of some leaders of contemporary society, is not easily determined. [184]  Happily Shakespeare wrote nothing else of like character.

p. 185XII—THE PRACTICAL AFFAIRS OF LIFE

Shakespeare’s practical temperament.

Shakespeare, in middle life, brought to practical affairs a singularly sane and sober temperament.  In ‘Ratseis Ghost’ (1605), an anecdotal biography of Gamaliel Ratsey, a notorious highwayman, who was hanged at Bedford on March 26, 1605, the highwayman is represented as compelling a troop of actors whom he met by chance on the road to perform in his presence.  At the close of the performance Ratsey, according to the memoir, addressed himself to a leader of the company, and cynically urged him to practise the utmost frugality in London.  ‘When thou feelest thy purse well lined (the counsellor proceeded), buy thee some place or lordship in the country that, growing weary of playing, thy money may there bring thee to dignity and reputation.’  Whether or no Ratsey’s biographer consciously identified the highwayman’s auditor with Shakespeare, it was the prosaic course of conduct marked out by Ratsey that Shakespeare literally followed.  As soon as his position in his profession was assured, he devoted his energies to re-establishing the fallen fortunes of his family in his native p. 186place, and to acquiring for himself and his successors the status of gentlefolk.

His father’s difficulties.

His father’s pecuniary embarrassments had steadily increased since his son’s departure.  Creditors harassed him unceasingly.  In 1587 one Nicholas Lane pursued him for a debt for which he had become liable as surety for his brother Henry, who was still farming their father’s lands at Snitterfield.  Through 1588 and 1589 John Shakespeare retaliated with pertinacity on a debtor named John Tompson.  But in 1591 a creditor, Adrian Quiney, obtained a writ of distraint against him, and although in 1592 he attested inventories taken on the death of two neighbours, Ralph Shaw and Henry Field, father of the London printer, he was on December 25 of the same year ‘presented’ as a recusant for absenting himself from church.  The commissioners reported that his absence was probably due to ‘fear of process for debt.’  He figures for the last time in the proceedings of the local court, in his customary rôle of defendant, on March 9, 1595.  He was then joined with two fellow traders—Philip Green, a chandler, and Henry Rogers, a butcher—as defendant in a suit brought by Adrian Quiney and Thomas Barker for the recovery of the sum of five pounds.  Unlike his partners in the litigation, his name is not followed in the record by a mention of his calling, and when the suit reached a later stage his name was omitted altogether.  These may be viewed as indications that in the course of the proceedings he finally retired from trade, which had been of late prolific in disasters for him.  In January 1596-7 he p. 187conveyed a slip of land attached to his dwelling in Henley Street to one George Badger.

His wife’s debt.

There is a likelihood that the poet’s wife fared, in the poet’s absence, no better than his father.  The only contemporary mention made of her between her marriage in 1582 and her husband’s death in 1616 is as the borrower at an unascertained date (evidently before 1595) of forty shillings from Thomas Whittington, who had formerly been her father’s shepherd.  The money was unpaid when Whittington died in 1601, and he directed his executor to recover the sum from the poet and distribute it among the poor of Stratford. [187]

It was probably in 1596 that Shakespeare returned, after nearly eleven years’ absence, to his native town, and worked a revolution in the affairs of his family.  The prosecutions of his father in the local court ceased.  Thenceforth the poet’s relations with Stratford were uninterrupted.  He still resided in London for most of the year; but until the close of his professional career he paid the town at least one annual visit, and he was always formally described as ‘of Stratford-on-Avon, gentleman.’  He was no doubt there on August 11, 1596, when his only son, Hamnet, was buried in the parish church; the boy was eleven and a half years old.

The coat-of-arms.

At the same date the poet’s father, despite his pecuniary embarrassments, took a step, by way of regaining his prestige, which must be assigned to the p. 188poet’s intervention. [188a]  He made application to the College of Heralds for a coat-of-arms. [188b]  Then, as now, the heralds when bestowing new coats-of-arms commonly credited the applicant’s family with an imaginary antiquity, and little reliance need be placed on the biographical or genealogical statements alleged in grants of arms.  The poet’s father or the poet himself when first applying to the College stated that John Shakespeare, in 1568, while he was bailiff of Stratford, and while he was by virtue of that office a justice of the peace, had obtained from Robert Cook, then Clarenceux herald, a ‘pattern’ or sketch of an armorial coat.  This allegation is not noticed in the records of the College, and may be a formal fiction designed by John Shakespeare and his son to recommend their claim to the notice of the heralds.  The negotiations of 1568, if they were not apocryphal, were certainly abortive; otherwise there would have been no necessity for the further action of 1596.  In any case, on October 20, 1596, a draft, which remains in the College of Arms, was p. 189prepared under the direction of William Dethick, Garter King-of-Arms, granting John’s request for a coat-of-arms.  Garter stated, with characteristic vagueness, that he had been ‘by credible report’ informed that the applicant’s ‘parentes and late antecessors were for theire valeant and faithfull service advanced and rewarded by the most prudent prince King Henry the Seventh of famous memories sythence whiche tyme they have continewed at those partes [i.e. Warwickshire] in good reputacion and credit;’ and that ‘the said John [had] maryed Mary, daughter and heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmcote, gent.’  In consideration of these titles to honour, Garter declared that he assigned to Shakespeare this shield, viz.: ‘Gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold steeled as aforesaid.’  In the margin of this draft-grant there is a pen sketch of the arms and crest, and above them is written the motto, ‘Non Sans Droict.’ [189]  A second copy of the draft, also dated in 1596, is extant at the College.  The only alterations are the substitution of the word ‘grandfather’ for ‘antecessors’ in the account of John Shakespeare’s ancestry, and the substitution of the word ‘esquire’ for ‘gent’ in the description of his wife’s father, Robert Arden.  At the foot of this draft, however, appeared some disconnected and p. 190unverifiable memoranda which John Shakespeare or his son had supplied to the heralds, to the effect that John had been bailiff of Stratford, had received a ‘pattern’ of a shield from Clarenceux Cook, was a man of substance, and had married into a worshipful family. [190]

Neither of these drafts was fully executed.  It may have been that the unduly favourable representations made to the College respecting John Shakespeare’s social and pecuniary position excited suspicion even in the habitually credulous minds of the heralds, or those officers may have deemed the profession of the son, who was conducting the negotiation, a bar to completing the transaction.  At any rate, Shakespeare and his father allowed three years to elapse before (as far as extant documents show) they made a further endeavour to secure the coveted distinction.  In 1599 their efforts were crowned with success.  Changes in the interval among the officials at the College may have facilitated the proceedings.  In 1597 the Earl of Essex had become Earl Marshal and chief of the Heralds’ College (the office had been in commission in 1596); while the great scholar and p. 191antiquary, William Camden, had joined the College, also in 1597, as Clarenceux King-of-Arms.  The poet was favourably known to both Camden and the Earl of Essex, the close friend of the Earl of Southampton.  His father’s application now took a new form.  No grant of arms was asked for.  It was asserted without qualification that the coat, as set out in the draft-grants of 1596, had been assigned to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff, and the heralds were merely invited to give him a ‘recognition’ or ‘exemplification’ of it. [191]  At the same time he asked permission for himself to impale, and his eldest son and other children to quarter, on ‘his ancient coat-of-arms’ that of the Ardens of Wilmcote, his wife’s family.  The College officers were characteristically complacent.  A draft was prepared under the hands of Dethick, the Garter King, and of Camden, the Clarenceux King, granting the required ‘exemplification’ and authorising the required impalement and quartering.  On one point only did Dethick and Camden betray conscientious scruples.  Shakespeare and his father obviously desired the heralds to recognise the title of Mary Shakespeare (the poet’s mother) to bear the arms of the great Warwickshire family of Arden, then seated at Park Hall.  But the relationship, if it existed, was undetermined; the Warwickshire Ardens were gentry of influence in the county, and were certain to p. 192protest against any hasty assumption of identity between their line and that of the humble farmer of Wilmcote.  After tricking the Warwickshire Arden coat in the margin of the draft-grant for the purpose of indicating the manner of its impalement, the heralds on second thoughts erased it.  They substituted in their sketch the arms of an Arden family living at Alvanley in the distant county of Cheshire.  With that stock there was no pretence that Robert Arden of Wilmcote was lineally connected; but the bearers of the Alvanley coat were unlikely to learn of its suggested impalement with the Shakespeare shield, and the heralds were less liable to the risk of litigation.  But the Shakespeares wisely relieved the College of all anxiety by omitting to assume the Arden coat.  The Shakespeare arms alone are displayed with full heraldic elaboration on the monument above the poet’s grave in Stratford Church; they alone appear on the seal and on the tombstone of his elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, impaled with the arms of her husband; [192a] and they alone were quartered by Thomas Nash, the first husband of the poet’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall. [192b]

Some objection was taken a few years later to the grant even of the Shakespeare shield, but it was based on vexatious grounds that could not be upheld.  Early in the seventeenth century Ralph Brooke, who was York herald from 1593 till his death in 1625, and was long engaged in a bitter quarrel with his fellow p. 193officers at the College, complained that the arms ‘exemplified’ to Shakespeare usurped the coat of Lord Mauley, on whose shield ‘a bend sable’ also figured.  Dethick and Camden, who were responsible for any breach of heraldic etiquette in the matter, answered that the Shakespeare shield bore no more resemblance to the Mauley coat than it did to that of the Harley and the Ferrers families, which also bore ‘a bend sable,’ but that in point of fact it differed conspicuously from all three by the presence of a spear on the ‘bend.’  Dethick and Camden added, with customary want of precision, that the person to whom the grant was made had ‘borne magistracy and was justice of peace at Stratford-on-Avon; he maried the daughter and heire of Arderne, and was able to maintain that Estate.’ [193]

Purchase of New Place.

Meanwhile, in 1597, the poet had taken openly in his own person a more effective step in the way of rehabilitating himself and his family in the eyes of his fellow townsmen.  On May 4 he purchased the largest house in the town, known as New Place.  It had been built by Sir Hugh Clopton more than a century before, and seems to have fallen into a ruinous condition.  But Shakespeare paid for it, with two barns and two gardens, the then substantial sum of £60.  Owing to the sudden death of the vendor, p. 194William Underhill, on July 7, 1597, the original transfer of the property was left at the time incomplete.  Underhill’s son Fulk died a felon, and he was succeeded in the family estates by his brother Hercules, who on coming of age, May 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare. [194a]  On February 4, 1597-8, Shakespeare was described as a householder in Chapel Street ward, in which New Place was situated, and as the owner of ten quarters of corn.  The inventory was made owing to the presence of famine in the town, and only two inhabitants were credited with a larger holding.  In the same year (1598) he procured stone for the repair of the house, and before 1602 had planted a fruit orchard.  He is traditionally said to have interested himself in the garden, and to have planted with his own hands a mulberry-tree, which was long a prominent feature of it.  When this was cut down, in 1758, numerous relics were made from it, and were treated with an almost superstitious veneration. [194b]  Shakespeare does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place till 1611.  In 1609 p. 195the house, or part of it, was occupied by the town clerk, Thomas Greene, ‘alias Shakespeare,’ who claimed to be the poet’s cousin.  His grandmother seems to have been a Shakespeare.  He often acted as the poet’s legal adviser.

It was doubtless under their son’s guidance that Shakespeare’s father and mother set on foot in November 1597—six months after his acquisition of New Place—a lawsuit against John Lambert for the recovery of the mortgaged estate of Asbies in Wilmcote.  The litigation dragged on for some years without result.

Appeals for aid from his fellow-townsmen.

Three letters written during 1598 by leading men at Stratford are still extant among the Corporation’s archives, and leave no doubt of the reputation for wealth and influence with which the purchase of New Place invested the poet in his fellow-townsmen’s eyes.  Abraham Sturley, who was once bailiff, writing early in 1598, apparently to a brother in London, says: ‘This is one special remembrance from our father’s motion.  It seemeth by him that our countryman, Mr. Shakspere, is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland or other at Shottery, or near about us: he thinketh it a very fit pattern to move him to deal in the matter of our tithes.  By the instructions you can give him thereof, and by the friends he can make therefor, we think it a fair mark for him to shoot at, and would do us much good.’  Richard Quiney, another townsman, father of Thomas (afterwards one of Shakespeare’s two sons-in-law), p. 196was, in the autumn of the same year, harassed by debt, and on October 25 appealed to Shakespeare for a loan of money.  ‘Loving countryman,’ the application ran, ‘I am bold of you as of a friend craving your help with xxxli.’  Quiney was staying at the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, London, and his main business in the metropolis was to procure exemption for the town of Stratford from the payment of a subsidy.  Abraham Sturley, writing to Quiney from Stratford ten days later (on November 4, 1598), pointed out to him that since the town was wholly unable, in consequence of the dearth of corn, to pay the tax, he hoped ‘that our countryman, Mr. Wm. Shak., would procure us money, which I will like of, as I shall hear when and where, and how.’

Financial position before 1599.

The financial prosperity to which this correspondence and the transactions immediately preceding it point has been treated as one of the chief mysteries of Shakespeare’s career, but the difficulties are gratuitous.  There is practically nothing in Shakespeare’s financial position that a study of the contemporary conditions of theatrical life does not fully explain.  It was not until 1599, when the Globe Theatre was built, that he acquired any share in the profits of a playhouse.  But his revenues as a successful dramatist and actor were by no means contemptible at an earlier date.  His gains in the capacity of dramatist formed the smaller source of income.  The highest price known to have been paid before 1599 to an author for a play by the manager of an acting company was p. 197£11; £6 was the lowest rate. [197a]  A small additional gratuity—rarely apparently exceeding ten shillings—was bestowed on a dramatist whose piece on its first production was especially well received; and the author was by custom allotted, by way of ‘benefit,’ a certain proportion of the receipts of the theatre on the production of a play for the second time. [197b]  Other sums, amounting at times to as much as £4, were bestowed on the author for revising and altering an old play for a revival.  The nineteen plays which may be set to Shakespeare’s credit between 1591 and 1599, combined with such revising work as fell to his lot during those eight years, cannot consequently have brought him less than £200, or some £20 a year.  Eight or nine of these plays were published during the period, but the p. 198publishers operated independently of the author, taking all the risks and, at the same time, all the receipts.  The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in no way affected his monetary resources, although his friendly relations with the printer Field doubtless secured him, despite the absence of any copyright law, some part of the profits in the large and continuous sale of his poems.

But it was as an actor that at an early date he acquired a genuinely substantial and secure income.  There is abundance of contemporary evidence to show that the stage was for an efficient actor an assured avenue to comparative wealth.  In 1590 Robert Greene describes in his tract entitled ‘Never too Late’ a meeting with a player whom he took by his ‘outward habit’ to be ‘a gentleman of great living’ and a ‘substantial man.’  The player informed Greene that he had at the beginning of his career travelled on foot, bearing his theatrical properties on his back, but he prospered so rapidly that at the time of speaking ‘his very share in playing apparel would not be sold for £200.’  Among his neighbours ‘where he dwelt’ he was reputed able ‘at his proper cost to build a windmill.’  In the university play, ‘The Return from Parnassus’ (1601?), a poor student enviously complains of the wealth and position which a successful actor derived from his calling.

England affords those glorious vagabonds,
That carried erst their fardles on their backs,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,
Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
And pages to attend their masterships;
p. 199With mouthing words that better wits had framed,
They purchase lands and now esquires are made. [199a]

The travelling actors, from whom the highwayman Gamaliel Ratsey extorted a free performance in 1604, were represented as men with the certainty of a rich competency in prospect. [199b]  An efficient actor received in 1635 as large a regular salary as £180.  The lowest known valuation set an actor’s wages at 3s. a day, or about £45 a year.  Shakespeare’s emoluments as an actor before 1599 are not likely to have fallen below £100; while the remuneration due to performances at Court or in noblemen’s houses, if the accounts of 1594 be accepted as the basis of reckoning, added some £15.

Thus over £130 (equal to £1,040 of to-day) would be Shakespeare’s average annual revenue before 1599.  Such a sum would be regarded as a very large income in a country town.  According to the author of ‘Ratseis Ghost,’ the actor, who may well have been meant for Shakespeare, practised in London a strict frugality, and there seems no reason why Shakespeare should not have been able in 1597 to draw from his p. 200savings £60 wherewith to buy New Place.  His resources might well justify his fellow-townsmen’s opinion of his wealth in 1598, and suffice between 1597 and 1599 to meet his expenses, in rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and conducting various legal proceedings.  But, according to tradition, he had in the Earl of Southampton a wealthy and generous friend who on one occasion gave him a large gift of money to enable ‘him to go through with’ a purchase to which he had a mind.  A munificent gift, added to professional gains, leaves nothing unaccounted for in Shakespeare’s financial position before 1599.

Financial position after 1599.

After 1599 his sources of income from the theatre greatly increased.  In 1635 the heirs of the actor Richard Burbage were engaged in litigation respecting their proprietary rights in the two playhouses, the Globe and the Blackfriars theatres.  The documents relating to this litigation supply authentic, although not very detailed, information of Shakespeare’s interest in theatrical property. [200]  Richard Burbage, with his brother Cuthbert, erected at their sole cost the Globe Theatre in the winter of 1598-9, and the Blackfriars Theatre, which their father was building at the time of his death in 1597, was also their property.  After completing the Globe they leased out, for twenty-one years, shares in the receipts of the theatre to ‘those deserving men Shakespeare, p. 201Hemings, Condell, Philips, and others.’  All the shareholders named were, like Burbage, active members of Shakespeare’s company of players.  The shares, which numbered sixteen in all, carried with them the obligation of providing for the expenses of the playhouse, and were doubtless in the first instance freely bestowed.  Hamlet claims, in the play scene (III. ii. 293), that the success of his improvised tragedy deserved to get him ‘a fellowship in a cry of players’—a proof that a successful dramatist might reasonably expect such a reward for a conspicuous effort.  In ‘Hamlet,’ moreover, both a share and a half-share of ‘a fellowship in a cry of players’ are described as assets of enviable value (III. ii. 294-6).  How many shares originally fell to Shakespeare there is no means of determining.  Records of later subdivisions suggest that they did not exceed two.  The Globe was an exceptionally large and popular playhouse.  It would accommodate some two thousand spectators, whose places cost them sums varying between twopence and half a crown.  The receipts were therefore considerable, hardly less than £25 daily, or some £8,000 a year.  According to the documents of 1635, an actor-sharer at the Globe received above £200 a year on each share, besides his actor’s salary of £180.  Thus Shakespeare drew from the Globe Theatre, at the lowest estimate, more than £500 a year in all.

His interest in the Blackfriars Theatre was comparatively unimportant, and is less easy to estimate.  The often quoted documents on which Collier depended to prove him a substantial shareholder in that p. 202playhouse have long been proved to be forgeries.  The pleas in the lawsuit of 1635 show that the Burbages, the owners, leased the Blackfriars Theatre after its establishment in 1597 for a long term of years to the master of the Children of the Chapel, but bought out the lessee at the end of 1609, and then ‘placed’ in it ‘men-players which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.’  To these and other actors they allotted shares in the receipts, the shares numbering eight in all.  The profits were far smaller than at the Globe, and if Shakespeare held one share (certainty on the point is impossible), it added not more than £100 a year to his income, and that not until 1610.

Later income.

His remuneration as dramatist between 1599 and 1611 was also by no means contemptible.  Prices paid to dramatists for plays rose rapidly in the early years of the seventeenth century, [202] while the value of the author’s ‘benefits’ grew with the growing vogue of the theatre.  The exceptional popularity of Shakespeare’s plays after 1599 gave him the full advantage of higher rates of pecuniary reward in all directions, and the seventeen plays which were produced by him between that year and the close of his professional career in 1611 probably brought him an average return of £20 each or £340 in all—nearly £30 a year.  At the same time the increase in the number of Court performances under James I, and the additional favour bestowed on Shakespeare’s p. 203company, may well have given that source of income the enhanced value of £20 a year. [203]

Thus Shakespeare in the later period of his life was earning above £600 a year in money of the period.  With so large a professional income he could easily, with good management, have completed those purchases of houses and land at Stratford on which he laid out, between 1599 and 1613, a total sum of £970, or an annual average of £70.  These properties, it must be remembered, represented investments, and he drew rent from most of them.  He traded, too, in agricultural produce.  There is nothing inherently improbable in the statement of John Ward, the seventeenth-century vicar of Stratford, that in his last years ‘he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard,’ although we may reasonably make allowance for exaggeration in the round figures.

Incomes of fellow-actors.

Shakespeare realised his theatrical shares several years before his death in 1616, when he left, according to his will, £350 in money in addition to an extensive real estate and numerous personal belongings.  There was nothing exceptional in this comparative affluence.  His friends and fellow-actors, Heming and Condell, amassed equally large, if not larger, fortunes.  Burbage died in 1619 worth £300 in land, besides personal property; while a contemporary actor and theatrical proprietor, Edward p. 204Alleyn, purchased the manor of Dulwich for £10,000 (in money of his own day), and devoted it, with much other property, to public uses, at the same time as he made ample provision for his family out of the residue of his estate.  Gifts from patrons may have continued occasionally to augment Shakespeare’s resources, but his wealth can be satisfactorily assigned to better attested agencies.  There is no ground for treating it as of mysterious origin. [204a]

Formation of the estate at Stratford 1601-10.

Between 1599 and 1611, while London remained Shakespeare’s chief home, he built up at Stratford a large landed estate which his purchase of New Place had inaugurated.  In 1601 his father died, being buried on September 8.  He apparently left no will, and the poet, as the eldest son, inherited the houses in Henley Street, the only portion of the property of the elder Shakespeare or of his wife which had not been alienated to creditors.  Shakespeare permitted his mother to reside in one of the Henley Street houses till her death (she was buried September 9, 1608), and he derived a modest rent from the other.  On May 1, 1602, he purchased for £320 of the rich landowners William and John Combe of Stratford 107 acres of arable land near the town.  The conveyance was delivered, in the poet’s absence, to his brother Gilbert, ‘to the use of the within named William Shakespere.’ [204b]  A third purchase quickly followed.  On September 28, 1602, at a court baron of the manor of Rowington, one p. 205Walter Getley transferred to the poet a cottage and garden which were situated at Chapel Lane, opposite the lower grounds of New Place.  They were held practically in fee-simple at the annual rental of 2s. 6d.  It appears from the roll that Shakespeare did not attend the manorial court held on the day fixed for the transfer of the property at Rowington, and it was consequently stipulated then that the estate should remain in the hands of the lady of the manor until he completed the purchase in person.  At a later period he was admitted to the copyhold, and he settled the remainder on his two daughters in fee.  In April 1610 he purchased from the Combes 20 acres of pasture land, to add to the 107 of arable land that he had acquired of the same owners in 1602.

The Stratford tithes.

As early as 1598 Abraham Sturley had suggested that Shakespeare should purchase the tithes of Stratford.  Seven years later, on July 24, 1605, he bought for £440 of Ralph Huband an unexpired term of thirty-one years of a ninety-two years’ lease of a moiety of the tithes of Stratford, Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe.  The moiety was subject to a rent of £17 to the corporation, who were the reversionary owners on the lease’s expiration, and of £5 to John Barker, the heir of a former proprietor.  The investment brought Shakespeare, under the most favourable circumstances, no more than an annuity of £38, and the refusal of persons who claimed an interest in the other moiety to acknowledge the full extent of their liability to the corporation led that body to demand p. 206from the poet payments justly due from others.  After 1609 he joined with two interested persons, Richard Lane of Awston and Thomas Greene, the town clerk of Stratford, in a suit in Chancery to determine the exact responsibilities of all the tithe-owners, and in 1612 they presented a bill of complaint to Lord-chancellor Ellesmere, with what result is unknown.  His acquisition of a part-ownership in the tithes was fruitful in legal embarrassments.

Recovery of small debts.

Shakespeare inherited his father’s love of litigation, and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business relations.  In March 1600 he recovered in London a debt of £7 from one John Clayton.  In July 1604, in the local court at Stratford, he sued one Philip Rogers, to whom he had supplied since the preceding March malt to the value of £1 19s. 10d, and had on June 25 lent 2s. in cash.  Rogers paid back 6s., and Shakespeare sought the balance of the account, £1 15s. 10d.  During 1608 and 1609 he was at law with another fellow-townsman, John Addenbroke.  On February 15, 1609, Shakespeare, who was apparently represented by his solicitor and kinsman Thomas Greene, [206a] obtained judgment from a jury against Addenbroke for the payment of £6, and £1 5s. costs, but Addenbroke left the town, and the triumph proved barren.  Shakespeare avenged himself by proceeding against one Thomas Horneby, who had acted as the absconding debtor’s bail. [206b]

p. 207XIII—MATURITY OF GENIUS

Literary work in 1599.

With an inconsistency that is more apparent than real, the astute business transactions of these years (1597-1611) synchronise with the production of Shakespeare’s noblest literary work—of his most sustained and serious efforts in comedy, tragedy, and romance.  In 1599, after abandoning English history with ‘Henry V,’ he addressed himself to the composition of his three most perfect essays in comedy—‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘As You Like It,’ and ‘Twelfth Night.’  Their good-humoured tone seems to reveal their author in his happiest frame of mind; in each the gaiety and tenderness of youthful womanhood are exhibited in fascinating union; while Shakespeare’s lyric gift bred no sweeter melodies than the songs with which the three plays are interspersed.  At the same time each comedy enshrines such penetrating reflections on mysterious problems of life as mark the stage of maturity in the growth of the author’s intellect.  The first two of the three plays were entered on the ‘Stationers’ Registers’ before August 4, 1600, on which day a prohibition was set on their publication, as well as on the publication of ‘Henry V’ and of Ben p. 208Jonson’s ‘Every Man in his Humour.’  This was one of the many efforts of the acting company to stop the publication of plays in the belief that the practice was injurious to their rights.  The effort was only partially successful.  ‘Much Ado,’ like ‘Henry V,’ was published before the close of the year.  Neither ‘As You Like It’ nor ‘Twelfth Night,’ however, was printed till it appeared in the Folio.

‘Much Ado.’

In ‘Much Ado,’ which appears to have been written in 1599, the brilliant and spirited comedy of Benedick and Beatrice, and of the blundering watchmen Dogberry and Verges, is wholly original; but the sombre story of Hero and Claudio, about which the comic incident revolves, is drawn from an Italian source, either from Bandello (novel. xxii.) through Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques,’ or from Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso’ through Sir John Harington’s translation (canto v.)  Ariosto’s version, in which the injured heroine is called Ginevra, and her lover Ariodante, had been dramatised before.  According to the accounts of the Court revels, ‘A Historie of Ariodante and Ginevra was showed before her Majestie on Shrovetuesdaie at night’ in 1583. [208]  Throughout Shakespeare’s play the ludicrous and serious aspects of humanity are blended with a convincing naturalness.  The popular comic actor William Kemp filled the role of Dogberry, and Cowley appeared as Verges.  In both the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 these actors’ names are p. 209prefixed by a copyist’s error to some of the speeches allotted to the two characters (act iv. scene ii.)

‘As You Like It.’

‘As You Like It,’ which quickly followed, is a dramatic adaptation of Lodge’s romance, ‘Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie’ (1590), but Shakespeare added three new characters of first-rate interest—Jaques, the meditative cynic; Touchstone, the most carefully elaborated of all Shakespeare’s fools; and the hoyden Audrey.  Hints for the scene of Orlando’s encounter with Charles the Wrestler, and for Touchstone’s description of the diverse shapes of a lie, were clearly drawn from a book called ‘Saviolo’s Practise,’ a manual of the art of self-defence, which appeared in 1595 from the pen of Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian fencing-master in the service of the Earl of Essex.  None of Shakespeare’s comedies breathes a more placid temper or approaches more nearly to a pastoral drama.  Yet there is no lack of intellectual or poetic energy in the enunciation of the contemplative philosophy which is cultivated in the Forest of Arden.  In Rosalind, Celia, Phœbe, and Audrey, four types of youthful womanhood are contrasted with the liveliest humour.

‘Twelfth Night.’

The date of ‘Twelfth Night’ is probably 1600, and its name, which has no reference to the story, doubtless commemorates the fact that it was designed for a Twelfth Night celebration.  ‘The new map with the augmentation of the Indies,’ spoken of by Maria (III. ii. 86), was a respectful reference to the great map of the world or ‘hydrographical description’ which was first issued with p. 210Hakluyt’s ‘Voyages’ in 1599 or 1600, and first disclosed the full extent of recent explorations of the ‘Indies’ in the New World and the Old. [210a]  Like the ‘Comedy of Errors,’ ‘Twelfth Night’ achieved the distinction, early in its career, of a presentation at an Inn of Court.  It was produced at Middle Temple Hall on February 2, 1601-2, and Manningham, a barrister who was present, described the performance. [210b]  Manningham wrote that the piece was ‘much like the “Comedy of Errors” or “Menechmi” in Plautus, but most like and neere to that in Italian called “Inganni.”’  Two sixteenth-century Italian plays entitled ‘Gl’ Inganni’ (‘The Cheats’), and a third called ‘Gl’ Ingannati,’ bear resemblance to ‘Twelfth Night.’  It is possible that Shakespeare had recourse to the last, which was based on Bandello’s novel of Nicuola, [210c] was first published at Siena in 1538, and became popular throughout Italy.  But in all probability he drew the story solely from the ‘Historie of Apolonius and Silla,’ which was related in ‘Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession’ (1581).  The author of that volume, Barnabe Riche, translated the tale either direct from Bandello’s Italian novel or from the French rendering of Bandello’s work in Belleforest’s ‘Histoires Tragiques.’  Romantic pathos, p. 211as in ‘Much Ado,’ is the dominant note of the main plot of ‘Twelfth Night,’ but Shakespeare neutralises the tone of sadness by his mirthful portrayal of Malvolio, Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Fabian, the clown Feste, and Maria, all of whom are his own creations.  The ludicrous gravity of Malvolio proved exceptionally popular on the stage.

‘Julius Cæsar,’ 1601.

In 1601 Shakespeare made a new departure by drawing a plot from North’s noble translation of Plutarch’s ‘Lives.’ [211a]  Plutarch is the king of biographers, and the deference which Shakespeare paid his work by adhering to the phraseology wherever it was practicable illustrates his literary discrimination.  On Plutarch’s lives of Julius Cæsar, Brutus, and Antony, Shakespeare based his historical tragedy of ‘Julius Cæsar.’  Weever, in 1601, in his ‘Mirror of Martyrs,’ plainly refers to the masterly speech in the Forum at Caæsar’s funeral which Shakespeare put into Antony’s mouth.  There is no suggestion of the speech in Plutarch; hence the composition of ‘Julius Cæsar’ may be held to have preceded the issue of Weever’s book in 1601.  The general topic was already familiar on the stage.  Polonius told Hamlet how, when he was at the university, he ‘did enact Julius Cæsar; he was kill’d in the Capitol: Brutus kill’d him.’ [211b]  A play of the same title was known as early as 1589, and was acted in 1594 by Shakespeare’s company.  Shakespeare’s piece is a penetrating study of political life, and, although the p. 212murder and funeral of Cæsar form the central episode and not the climax, the tragedy is thoroughly well planned and balanced.  Cæsar is ironically depicted in his dotage.  The characters of Brutus, Antony, and Cassius, the real heroes of the action, are exhibited with faultless art.  The fifth act, which presents the battle of Philippi in progress, proves ineffective on the stage, but the reader never relaxes his interest in the fortunes of the vanquished Brutus, whose death is the catastrophe.

While ‘Julius Cæsar’ was winning its first laurels on the stage, the fortunes of the London theatres were menaced by two manifestations of unreasoning prejudice on the part of the public.  The earlier manifestation, although speciously the more serious, was in effect innocuous.  The puritans of the city of London had long agitated for the suppression of all theatrical performances, and it seemed as if the agitators triumphed when they induced the Privy Council on June 22, 1600, to issue to the officers of the Corporation of London and to the justices of the peace of Middlesex and Surrey an order forbidding the maintenance of more than two playhouses—one in Middlesex (Alleyn’s newly erected playhouse, the ‘Fortune’ in Cripplegate), and the other in Surrey (the ‘Globe’ on the Bankside).  The contemplated restriction would have deprived very many actors of employment, and driven others to seek a precarious livelihood in the provinces.  Happily, disaster was averted by the failure of the municipal authorities and the magistrates of Surrey and Middlesex to make the order operative.  All the London p. 213theatres that were already in existence went on their way unchecked. [213a]

The strife between adult and boy actors.

More calamitous was a temporary reverse of fortune which Shakespeare’s company, in common with the other companies of adult actors, suffered soon afterwards at the hands, not of fanatical enemies of the drama, but of playgoers who were its avowed supporters.  The company of boy-actors, chiefly recruited from the choristers of the Chapel Royal, and known as ‘the Children of the Chapel,’ had since 1597 been installed at the new theatre in Blackfriars, and after 1600 the fortunes of the veterans, who occupied rival stages, were put in jeopardy by the extravagant outburst of public favour that the boys’ performances evoked.  In ‘Hamlet,’ the play which followed ‘Julius Cæsar,’ Shakespeare pointed out the perils of the situation. [213b]  The adult p. 214actors, Shakespeare asserted, were prevented from performing in London through no falling off in their efficiency, but by the ‘late innovation’ of the children’s vogue. [214a]  They were compelled to go on tour in the provinces, at the expense of their revenues and reputation, because ‘an aery [i.e. nest] of children, little eyases [i.e. young hawks],’ dominated the theatrical world, and monopolised public applause.  ‘These are now the fashion,’ the dramatist lamented, [214b] and he made the topic the text of a reflection on the fickleness of public taste:

Hamlet.  Do the boys carry it away?

Rosencrantz.  Ay, that they do, my lord, Hercules and his load too.

Hamlet.  It is not very strange; for my uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while my father lived, give twenty, forty, fifty, a hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little.

Jealousies in the ranks of the dramatists accentuated the actors’ difficulties.  Ben Jonson was, at the end of the sixteenth century, engaged in a fierce personal quarrel with two of his fellow dramatists, Marston and Dekker.  The adult actors generally avowed sympathy with Jonson’s foes.  Jonson, by way of revenge, sought an offensive alliance with ‘the Children of the Chapel.’  Under careful tuition the boys proved capable of performing much the same pieces as the men.  To ‘the children’ Jonson offered p. 215in 1600 his comical satire of ‘Cynthia’s Revels,’ in which he held up to ridicule Dekker, Marston, and their actor-friends.  The play, when acted by ‘the children’ at the Blackfriars Theatre, was warmly welcomed by the audience.  Next year Jonson repeated his manœuvre with greater effect.  He learnt that Marston and Dekker were conspiring with the actors of Shakespeare’s company to attack him in a piece called ‘Satiro-Mastix, or the Untrussing of the Humourous Poet.’  He anticipated their design by producing, again with ‘the Children of the Chapel,’ his ‘Poetaster,’ which was throughout a venomous invective against his enemies—dramatists and actors alike.  Shakespeare’s company retorted by producing Dekker and Marston’s ‘Satiro-Mastix’ at the Globe Theatre next year.  But Jonson’s action had given new life to the vogue of the children.  Playgoers took sides in the struggle, and their attention was for a season riveted, to the exclusion of topics more germane to their province, on the actors’ and dramatists’ boisterous war of personalities. [215]

Shakespeare’s references to the struggle.

p. 216In his detailed references to the conflict in ‘Hamlet’ Shakespeare protested against the abusive comments on the men-actors of ‘the common stages’ or public theatres which were put into the children’s mouths.  Rosencrantz declared that the children ‘so berattle [i.e. assail] the common stages—so they call them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither [i.e. to the public theatres].’  Hamlet in pursuit of the theme pointed out that the writers who encouraged the vogue of the ‘child-actors’ did them a poor service, because when the boys should reach men’s estate they would run the risk, if they continued on the stage, of the same insults and neglect which now threatened their seniors.

Hamlet.  What are they children?  Who maintains ’em? how are they escoted [i.e. paid]?  Will they pursue the quality [i.e. the actor’s profession] no longer than they can sing?  Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players—as it is most like, if their means are no better—their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?

Rosencrantz.  Faith, there has been much to do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tarre [i.e. incite] them to controversy: there was for a while no money bid for argument, unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.

Hamlet.  Is it possible?

Guildenstern.  O, there has been much throwing about of brains!

p. 217Shakespeare clearly favoured the adult actors in their rivalry with the boys, but he wrote more like a disinterested spectator than an active partisan when he made specific reference to the strife between the poet Ben Jonson and the players.  In the prologue to ‘Troilus and Cressida’ which he penned in 1603, he warned his hearers, with obvious allusion to Ben Jonson’s battles, that he hesitated to identify himself with either actor or poet. [217]  Passages in Ben Jonson’s ‘Poetaster,’ moreover, pointedly suggest that Shakespeare cultivated so assiduously an attitude of neutrality that Jonson acknowledged him to be qualified for the role of peacemaker.  The gentleness of disposition with which Shakespeare was invariably credited by his friends would have well fitted him for such an office.

Jonson’s ‘Poetaster.’

Jonson figures personally in the ‘Poetaster’ under the name of Horace.  Episodically Horace and his friends, Tibullus and Gallus, eulogise the work and genius of another character, Virgil, in terms so closely resembling those which Jonson is known to have applied to Shakespeare that they may be regarded as intended to apply to him (act v. sc. i.)  Jonson points out that Virgil, by his penetrating intuition, achieved the great effects which others laboriously sought to reach through rules of art.

His learning labours not the school-like gloss
That most consists of echoing words and terms . . .
Nor any long or far-fetched circumstance—
Wrapt in the curious generalities of arts—
p. 218But a direct and analytic sum
Of all the worth and first effects of arts.
And for his poesy, ’tis so rammed with life
That it shall gather strength of life with being,
And live hereafter, more admired than now.

Tibullus gives Virgil equal credit for having in his writings touched with telling truth upon every vicissitude of human existence.

That which he hath writ
Is with such judgment laboured and distilled
Through all the needful uses of our lives
That, could a man remember but his lines,
He should not touch at any serious point
But he might breathe his spirit out of him.

Finally, Virgil in the play is nominated by Cæsar to act as judge between Horace and his libellers, and he advises the administration of purging pills to the offenders.  That course of treatment is adopted with satisfactory results. [218]

Shakespeare’s alleged partisanship.

As against this interpretation, one contemporary witness has been held to testify that Shakespeare stemmed the tide of Jonson’s embittered activity by no peace-making interposition, but by joining his foes, and by administering to him, with their aid, the identical course of medicine which in the ‘Poetaster’ is meted out to his enemies.  In the same year (1601) as the ‘Poetaster’ was produced, ‘The Return from Parnassus’—a third piece in a trilogy of plays—was ‘acted p. 219by the students in St. John’s College, Cambridge.’  In this piece, as in its two predecessors, Shakespeare received, both as a playwright and a poet, high commendation, although his poems were judged to reflect somewhat too largely ‘love’s lazy foolish languishment.’  The actor Burbage was introduced in his own name instructing an aspirant to the actor’s profession in the part of Richard the Third, and the familiar lines from Shakespeare’s play—

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York—

are recited by the pupil as part of his lesson.  Subsequently in a prose dialogue between Shakespeare’s fellow-actors Burbage and Kempe, Kempe remarks of university dramatists, ‘Why, here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson, too.  O! that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow.  He brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill; but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit.’  Burbage adds: ‘He is a shrewd fellow indeed.’  This perplexing passage has been held to mean that Shakespeare took a decisive part against Jonson in the controversy with Dekker and Dekker’s actor friends.  But such a conclusion is nowhere corroborated, and seems to be confuted by the eulogies of Virgil in the ‘Poetaster’ and by the general handling of the theme in ‘Hamlet.’  The words quoted from ‘The Return from Parnassus’ hardly admit of a literal interpretation.  Probably the ‘purge’ that Shakespeare was alleged by the author p. 220of ‘The Return from Parnassus’ to have given Jonson meant no more than that Shakespeare had signally outstripped Jonson in popular esteem.  As the author of ‘Julius Cæsar,’ he had just proved his command of topics that were peculiarly suited to Jonson’s vein, [220] and had in fact outrun his churlish comrade on his own ground.

‘Hamlet,’ 1602.

p. 221At any rate, in the tragedy that Shakespeare brought out in the year following the production of ‘Julius Cæsar,’ he finally left Jonson and all friends and foes lagging far behind both in achievement and reputation.  This new exhibition of the force of his genius re-established, too, the ascendency of the adult actors who interpreted his work, and the boys’ supremacy was quickly brought to an end.  In 1602 Shakespeare produced ‘Hamlet,’ ‘that piece of his which most kindled English hearts.’  The story of the Prince of Denmark had been popular on the stage as early as 1589 in a lost dramatic version by another writer—doubtless Thomas Kyd, whose tragedies of blood, ‘The Spanish Tragedy’ and ‘Jeronimo,’ long held the Elizabethan stage.  To that lost version of ‘Hamlet’ Shakespeare’s tragedy certainly owed much. [221]  The story was also accessible in the p. 222‘Histoires Tragiques’ of Belleforest, who adapted it from the ‘Historia Danica’ of Saxo Grammaticus. [222]  No English translation of Belleforest’s ‘Hystorie of Hamblet’ appeared before 1608; Shakespeare doubtless read it in the French.  But his authorities give little hint of what was to emerge from his study of them.

The problem of its publication.

The First Quarto, 1603.

Burbage created the title-part in Shakespeare’s tragedy, and its success on the stage led to the play’s publication immediately afterwards.  The bibliography of ‘Hamlet’ offers a puzzling problem.  On July 26, 1602, ‘A Book called the Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his Servants,’ was entered on the Stationers’ Company’s Registers, and it was published in quarto next year by N[icholas] p. 223L[ing] and John Trundell.  The title-page stated that the piece had been ‘acted divers times in the city of London, as also in the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere.’  The text here appeared in a rough and imperfect state.  In all probability it was a piratical and carelessly transcribed copy of Shakespeare’s first draft of the play, in which he drew largely on the older piece.

The Second Quarto, 1604.

A revised version, printed from a more complete and accurate manuscript, was published in 1604 as ‘The Tragical History of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, newly imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy.’  This was printed by I[ames] R[oberts] for the publisher N[icholas] L[ing].  The concluding words—‘according to the true and perfect copy’—of the title-page of the second quarto were intended to stamp its predecessor as surreptitious and unauthentic.  But it is clear that the Second Quarto was not a perfect version of the play.  It was itself printed from a copy which had been curtailed for acting purposes.

The Folio Version.

A third version (long the textus receptus) figured in the Folio of 1623.  Here many passages, not to be found in the quartos, appear for the first time, but a few others that appear in the quartos are omitted.  The Folio text probably came nearest to the original manuscript; but it, too, followed an acting copy which had been abbreviated somewhat less drastically than the Second Quarto and in a p. 224different fashion. [224]  Theobald in his ‘Shakespeare Restored’ (1726) made the first scholarly attempt to form a text from a collation of the First Folio with the Second Quarto, and Theobald’s text with further embellishments by Sir Thomas Hanmer, Edward Capell, and the Cambridge editors of 1866, is now generally adopted.

Popularity of ‘Hamlet.’

‘Hamlet’ was the only drama by Shakespeare that was acted in his lifetime at the two Universities.  It has since attracted more attention from actors, playgoers, and readers of all capacities than any other of Shakespeare’s plays.  Its world-wide popularity from its author’s day to our own, when it is as warmly welcomed in the theatres of France and Germany as in those of England and America, is the most striking of the many testimonies to the eminence of Shakespeare’s dramatic instinct.  At a first glance there seems little in the play to attract the uneducated or the unreflecting.  ‘Hamlet’ is mainly a psychological effort, a study of the reflective temperament in excess.  The action develops slowly; at times there is no movement at all.  The piece is the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, reaching a total of over 3,900 lines.  It is thus some nine hundred lines longer than ‘Antony and Cleopatra’—the play by Shakespeare that approaches ‘Hamlet’ more closely in numerical strength of lines.  At the same time the total length of Hamlet’s speeches far p. 225exceeds that of those allotted by Shakespeare to any other of his characters.  Humorous relief is, it is true, effectively supplied to the tragic theme by Polonius and the grave-diggers, and if the topical references to contemporary theatrical history (II. ii. 350-89) could only count on an appreciative reception from an Elizabethan audience, the pungent censure of actors’ perennial defects is calculated to catch the ear of the average playgoer of all ages.  But it is not to these subsidiary features that the universality of the play’s vogue can be attributed.  It is the intensity of interest which Shakespeare contrives to excite in the character of the hero that explains the position of the play in popular esteem.  The play’s unrivalled power of attraction lies in the pathetic fascination exerted on minds of almost every calibre by the central figure—a high-born youth of chivalric instincts and finely developed intellect, who, when stirred to avenge in action a desperate private wrong, is foiled by introspective workings of the brain that paralyse the will.

‘Troilus and Cressida.’

Although the difficulties of determining the date of ‘Troilus and Cressida’ are very great, there are many grounds for assigning its composition to the early days of 1603.  In 1599 Dekker and Chettle were engaged by Henslowe to prepare for the Earl of Nottingham’s company—a rival of Shakespeare’s company—a play of ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ of which no trace survives.  It doubtless suggested the topic to Shakespeare.  On February 7, 1602-3, James Roberts obtained a license for ‘the p. 226booke of Troilus and Cresseda as yt is acted by my Lord Chamberlens men,’ i.e. Shakespeare’s company. [226a]  Roberts printed the Second Quarto of ‘Hamlet’ and others of Shakespeare’s plays; but his effort to publish ‘Troilus’ proved abortive owing to the interposition of the players.  Roberts’s ‘book’ was probably Shakespeare’s play.  The metrical characteristics of Shakespeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida’—the regularity of the blank verse—powerfully confirm the date of composition which Roberts’s license suggests.  Six years later, however, on January 28, 1608-9, a new license for the issue of ‘a booke called the history of Troylus and Cressida’ was granted to other publishers, Richard Bonian and Henry Walley, [226b] and these publishers, more fortunate than Roberts soon printed a quarto with Shakespeare’s full name as author.  The text seems fairly authentic, but exceptional obscurity attaches to the circumstances of the publication.  Some copies of the book bear an ordinary type of title-page stating that the piece was printed ‘as it was acted by the King’s majesties servants at the Globe.’  But in other copies, which differ in no way in regard to the text of the play, there was substituted for this title-page a more pretentious announcement running: ‘The famous Historie of Troylus and Cresseid, excellently expressing the beginning of their loues with the conceited wooing of Pandarus, prince of Lacia.’  After this pompous title-page there was inserted, for the first and only time in the case of a play by Shakespeare that was p. 227published in his lifetime, an advertisement or preface.  In this interpolated page an anonymous scribe, writing in the name of the publishers, paid bombastic and high-flown compliments to Shakespeare as a writer of ‘comedies,’ and defiantly boasted that the ‘grand possessers’—i.e. the owners—of the manuscript deprecated its publication.  By way of enhancing the value of what were obviously stolen wares, it was falsely added that the piece was new and unacted.  This address was possibly the brazen reply of the publishers to a more than usually emphatic protest on the part of players or dramatist against the printing of the piece.  The editors of the Folio evinced distrust of the Quarto edition by printing their text from a different copy showing many deviations, which were not always for the better.

Treatment of the theme.

The work, which in point of construction shows signs of haste, and in style is exceptionally unequal, is the least attractive of the efforts of Shakespeare’s middle life.  The story is based on a romantic legend of the Trojan war, which is of mediæval origin.  Shakespeare had possibly read Chapman’s translation of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’ but he owed his plot to Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Cresseid’ and Lydgate’s ‘Troy Book.’  In defiance of his authorities he presented Cressida as a heartless coquette; the poets who had previously treated her story—Boccaccio, Chaucer, Lydgate, and Robert Henryson—had imagined her as a tender-hearted, if frail, beauty, with claims on their pity rather than on their p. 228scorn.  But Shakespeare’s innovation is dramatically effective, and accords with strictly moral canons.  The charge frequently brought against the dramatist that in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ he cynically invested the Greek heroes of classical antiquity with contemptible characteristics is ill supported by the text of the play.  Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon figure in Shakespeare’s play as brave generals and sagacious statesmen, and in their speeches Shakespeare concentrated a marvellous wealth of pithily expressed philosophy, much of which has fortunately obtained proverbial currency.  Shakespeare’s conception of the Greeks followed traditional lines except in the case of Achilles, whom he transforms into a brutal coward.  And that portrait quite legitimately interpreted the selfish, unreasoning, and exorbitant pride with which the warrior was credited by Homer, and his imitators.

Shakespeare’s treatment of his theme cannot therefore be fairly construed, as some critics construe it, into a petty-minded protest against the honour paid to the ancient Greeks and to the form and sentiment of their literature by more learned dramatists of the day, like Ben Jonson and Chapman.  Although Shakespeare knew the Homeric version of the Trojan war, he worked in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ upon a mediæval romance, which was practically uninfluenced either for good or evil by the classical spirit. [228]

Queen Elizabeth’s death, March 26, 1603.

p. 229Despite the association of Shakespeare’s company with the rebellion of 1601, and its difficulties with the children of the Chapel Royal, he and his fellow actors p. 230retained their hold on Court favour till the close of Elizabeth’s reign.  As late as February 2, 1603, the company entertained the dying Queen at Richmond.  Her death on March 26, 1603, drew from Shakespeare’s early eulogist, Chettle, a vain appeal to him under the fanciful name of Melicert, to

  Drop from his honied muse one sable teare,
To mourne her death that gracèd his desert,
And to his laies opened her royal eare. [230]

But, except on sentimental grounds, the Queen’s death justified no lamentation on the part of Shakespeare.  On the withdrawal of one royal patron he and his friends at once found another, who proved far more liberal and appreciative.

James I’s patronage.

On May 19, 1603, James I, very soon after his accession, extended to Shakespeare and other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s company a very marked and valuable recognition.  To them he granted under royal letters patent a license ‘freely to use and exercise the arte and facultie of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, enterludes, moralls, pastoralles, stage-plaies, and such other like as they have already studied, or hereafter shall use or studie as well for the recreation of our loving subjectes as for our solace and pleasure, when we shall thinke good to see them during our pleasure.’  The Globe Theatre was noted as the customary scene of their labours, but permission was granted to them to p. 231perform in the town-hall or moot-hall of any country town.  Nine actors are named.  Lawrence Fletcher stands first on the list; he had already performed before James in Scotland in 1599 and 1601.  Shakespeare comes second and Burbage third.  The company to which they belonged was thenceforth styled the King’s company; its members became ‘the King’s Servants’ and they took rank with the Grooms of the Chamber. [231]  Shakespeare’s plays were thenceforth repeatedly performed in James’s presence, and Oldys related that James wrote Shakespeare a letter in his own hand, which was at one time in the possession of Sir William D’Avenant, and afterwards, according to Lintot, in that of John Sheffield, first duke of Buckingham.

In the autumn and winter of 1603 the prevalence of the plague led to the closing of the theatres in London.  The King’s players were compelled to make a prolonged tour in the provinces, which entailed some loss of income.  For two months from the third week in October, the Court was temporarily installed at Wilton, the residence of William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke, and late in November the company was summoned by the royal officers p. 232to perform in the royal presence.  The actors travelled from Mortlake to Salisbury ‘unto the Courte aforesaide,’ and their performance took place at Wilton House on December 2.  They received next day ‘upon the Councells warrant’ the large sum of £30 ‘by way of his majesties reward.’ [232a]  Many other gracious marks of royal favour followed.  On March 15, 1604, Shakespeare and eight other actors of the company walked from the Tower of London to Westminster in the procession which accompanied the King on his formal entry into London.  Each actor received four and a half yards of scarlet cloth to wear as a cloak on the occasion, and in the document authorising the grant Shakespeare’s name stands first on the list. [232b]  The dramatist Dekker was author of a somewhat bombastic account of the elaborate ceremonial, which rapidly ran through three editions.  On p. 233April 9, 1604, the King gave further proof of his friendly interest in the fortunes of his actors by causing an official letter to be sent to the Lord Mayor of London and the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex and Surrey, bidding them ‘permit and suffer’ the King’s players to ‘exercise their playes’ at their ‘usual house,’ the Globe. [233a]  Four months later—in August—every member of the company was summoned by the King’s order to attend at Somerset House during the fortnight’s sojourn there of the Spanish ambassador extraordinary, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, duke de Frias, and Constable of Castile, who came to London to ratify the treaty of peace between England and Spain, and was magnificently entertained by the English Court. [233b]  Between All Saints’ Day [November 1] p. 234and the ensuing Shrove Tuesday, which fell early in February 1605, Shakespeare’s company gave no fewer than eleven performances at Whitehall in the royal presence.

p. 235XIV—THE HIGHEST THEMES OF TRAGEDY

‘Othello’ and ‘Measure for Measure.’

Under the incentive of such exalted patronage, Shakespeare’s activity redoubled, but his work shows none of the conventional marks of literature that is produced in the blaze of Court favour.  The first six years of the new reign saw him absorbed in the highest themes of tragedy, and an unparalleled intensity and energy, which bore few traces of the trammels of a Court, thenceforth illumined every scene that he contrived.  To 1604 the composition of two plays can be confidently assigned, one of which—‘Othello’—ranks with Shakespeare’s greatest achievements; while the other—‘Measure for Measure’—although as a whole far inferior to ‘Othello,’ contains one of the finest scenes (between Angelo and Isabella, II. ii. 43 sq.) and one of the greatest speeches (Claudio on the fear of death, III. i. 116-30) in the range of Shakespearean drama.  ‘Othello’ was doubtless the first new piece by Shakespeare that was acted before James.  It was produced at Whitehall on November 1.  ‘Measure for Measure’ followed on December 26. [235]  Neither was printed in Shakespeare’s p. 236lifetime.  The plots of both ultimately come from the same Italian collection of novels—Giraldi Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi,’ which was first published in 1565.

Cinthio’s painful story of ‘Othello’ (decad. iii. nov. 3) is not known to have been translated into English before Shakespeare dramatised it.  He followed its main drift with fidelity, but he introduced the new characters of Roderigo and Emilia, and he invested the catastrophe with new and fearful intensity by making Iago’s cruel treachery known to Othello at the last, after Iago’s perfidy has impelled the noble-hearted Moor in his groundless jealousy to murder his gentle and innocent wife Desdemona.  Iago became in Shakespeare’s hands the subtlest of all studies of intellectual villainy and hypocrisy.  The whole tragedy displays to magnificent advantage the dramatist’s fully matured powers.  An unfaltering p. 237equilibrium is maintained in the treatment of plot and characters alike.

Cinthio made the perilous story of ‘Measure for Measure’ the subject not only of a romance, but of a tragedy called ‘Epitia.’  Before Shakespeare wrote his play, Cinthio’s romance had been twice rendered into English by George Whetstone.  Whetstone had not only given a somewhat altered version of the Italian romance in his unwieldy play of ‘Promos and Cassandra’ (in two parts of five acts each, 1578), but he had also freely translated it in his collection of prose tales, ‘Heptameron of Civil Discources’ (1582).  Yet there is every likelihood that Shakespeare also knew Cinthio’s play, which, unlike his romance, was untranslated; the leading character, who is by Shakespeare christened Angelo, was known by another name to Cinthio in his story, but Cinthio in his play (and not in his novel) gives the character a sister named Angela, which doubtless suggested Shakespeare’s designation. [237]  In the hands of Shakespeare’s predecessors the tale is a sordid record of lust and cruelty.  But Shakespeare prudently showed scant respect for their handling of the narrative.  By diverting the course of the plot at a critical point he not merely proved his artistic ingenuity, but gave dramatic dignity and moral elevation to a degraded and repellent theme.  In the old versions Isabella yields her virtue as the price of her brother’s life.  The central fact of Shakespeare’s play is Isabella’s inflexible and unconditional chastity.  Other of Shakespeare’s p. 238alterations, like the Duke’s abrupt proposal to marry Isabella, seem hastily conceived.  But his creation of the pathetic character of Mariana ‘of the moated grange’—the legally affianced bride of Angelo, Isabella’s would-be seducer—skilfully excludes the possibility of a settlement (as in the old stories) between Isabella and Angelo on terms of marriage.  Shakespeare’s argument is throughout philosophically subtle.  The poetic eloquence in which Isabella and the Duke pay homage to the virtue of chastity, and the many expositions of the corruption with which unchecked sexual passion threatens society, alternate with coarsely comic interludes which suggest the vanity of seeking to efface natural instincts by the coercion of law.  There is little in the play that seems designed to recommend it to the Court before which it was first performed.  But the two emphatic references to a ruler’s dislike of mobs, despite his love of his people, were perhaps penned in deferential allusion to James I, whose horror of crowds was notorious.  In act i. sc. i. 67-72 the Duke remarks:

              I love the people,
But do not like to stage me to their eyes.
Though it do well, I do not relish well
Their loud applause and aves vehement.
Nor do I think the man of safe discretion
That does affect it.

Of like tenor is the succeeding speech of Angelo (act ii. sc. iv. 27-30):

The general [i.e. the public], subject to a well-wish’d king, . . .
Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love
Must needs appear offence.

‘Macbeth.’

p. 239In ‘Macbeth,’ his ‘great epic drama,’ which he began in 1605 and completed next year, Shakespeare employed a setting wholly in harmony with the accession of a Scottish king.  The story was drawn from Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle of Scottish History,’ with occasional reference, perhaps, to earlier Scottish sources. [239]  The supernatural machinery of the three witches accorded with the King’s superstitious faith in demonology; the dramatist lavished his sympathy on Banquo, James’s ancestor; while Macbeth’s vision of kings who carry ‘twofold balls and treble sceptres’ (iv. i. 20) plainly adverted to the union of Scotland with England and Ireland under James’s sway.  The allusion by the porter (ii. iii. 9) to the ‘equivocator . . . who committed treason’ was perhaps suggested by the notorious defence of the doctrine of equivocation made by the Jesuit Henry Garnett, who was executed early in 1606 for his share in the ‘Gunpowder Plot.’  The piece was not printed until 1623.  It is in its existing shape by far the shortest of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, (‘Hamlet’ is nearly twice as long) and it is possible that it survives only in an abbreviated acting version.  Much scenic elaboration characterised the production.  Dr. Simon Forman witnessed a performance of the tragedy at the Globe in April 1611, and noted that Macbeth and Banquo entered the stage on horseback, and that Banquo’s ghost was materially represented (iii. iv. 40 seq.)  Like ‘Othello,’ the play ranks with the noblest tragedies either of the modern or the ancient world.  The characters of hero and heroinep. 240—Macbeth and his wife—are depicted with the utmost subtlety and insight.  In three points ‘Macbeth’ differs somewhat from other of Shakespeare’s productions in the great class of literature to which it belongs.  The interweaving with the tragic story of supernatural interludes in which Fate is weirdly personified is not exactly matched in any other of Shakespeare’s tragedies.  In the second place, the action proceeds with a rapidity that is wholly without parallel in the rest of Shakespeare’s plays.  Nowhere, moreover, has Shakespeare introduced comic relief into a tragedy with bolder effect than in the porter’s speech after the murder of Duncan (II. iii. I seq.)  The theory that this passage was from another hand does not merit acceptance. [240]  It cannot, however, be overlooked that the second scene of the first act—Duncan’s interview with the ‘bleeding sergeant’—falls so far below the style of the rest of the play as to suggest that it was an interpolation by a hack of the theatre.  The resemblances between Thomas Middleton’s later play of ‘The Witch’ (1610) and portions of ‘Macbeth’ may safely be ascribed to plagiarism on Middleton’s part.  Of two songs which, according to the stage directions, were to be sung during the representation of ‘Macbeth’ (III. v. and IV. i.), only the first line of each is noted there, but songs beginning with the same lines are set out in full in Middleton’s play; they were probably by Middleton, and were interpolated by actors in a stage version of ‘Macbeth’ after its original production.

‘King Lear.’

p. 241‘King Lear,’ in which Shakespeare’s tragic genius moved without any faltering on Titanic heights, was written during 1606, and was produced before the Court at Whitehall on the night of December 26 of that year. [241a]  It was entered on the ‘Stationers’ Registers’ on November 26, 1607, and two imperfect editions, published by Nathaniel Butter, appeared in the following year; neither exactly corresponds with the other or with the improved and fairly satisfactory text of the Folio.  The three versions present three different playhouse transcripts.  Like its immediate predecessor, ‘Macbeth,’ the tragedy was mainly founded on Holinshed’s ‘Chronicle.’  The leading theme had been dramatised as early as 1593, but Shakespeare’s attention was no doubt directed to it by the publication of a crude dramatic adaptation of Holinshed’s version in 1605 under the title of ‘The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his three Daughters—Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella.’  Shakespeare did not adhere closely to his original.  He invested the tale of Lear with a hopelessly tragic conclusion, and on it he grafted the equally distressing tale of Gloucester and his two sons, which he drew from Sidney’s ‘Arcadia.’ [241b]  Hints for the speeches of Edgar when feigning madness were drawn from Harsnet’s ‘Declaration of Popish p. 242Impostures,’ 1603.  In every act of ‘Lear’ the pity and terror of which tragedy is capable reach their climax.  Only one who has something of the Shakespearean gift of language could adequately characterise the scenes of agony—‘the living martyrdom’—to which the fiendish ingratitude of his daughters condemns the abdicated king—‘a very foolish, fond old man, fourscore and upward.’  The elemental passions burst forth in his utterances with all the vehemence of the volcanic tempest which beats about his defenceless head in the scene on the heath.  The brutal blinding of Gloucester by Cornwall exceeds in horror any other situation that Shakespeare created, if we assume that he was not responsible for the like scenes of mutilation in ‘Titus Andronicus.’  At no point in ‘Lear’ is there any loosening of the tragic tension.  The faithful half-witted lad who serves the king as his fool plays the jesting chorus on his master’s fortunes in penetrating earnest and deepens the desolating pathos.

‘Timon of Athens.’

Although Shakespeare’s powers showed no sign of exhaustion, he reverted in the year following the colossal effort of ‘Lear’ (1607) to his earlier habit of collaboration, and with another’s aid composed two dramas—‘Timon of Athens’ and ‘Pericles.’  An extant play on the subject of ‘Timon of Athens’ was composed in 1600, [242] but there is nothing to show that Shakespeare and his coadjutor were acquainted with it.  They doubtless derived a part p. 243of their story from Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ and from a short digression in Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marc Antony,’ where Antony is described as emulating the life and example of ‘Timon Misanthropos the Athenian.’  The dramatists may, too, have known a dialogue of Lucian entitled ‘Timon,’ which Boiardo had previously converted into a comedy under the name of ‘Il Timone.’  Internal evidence makes it clear that Shakespeare’s colleague was responsible for nearly the whole of acts III. and V.  But the character of Timon himself and all the scenes which he dominates are from Shakespeare’s pen.  Timon is cast in the mould of Lear.

‘Pericles.’

There seems some ground for the belief that Shakespeare’s coadjutor in ‘Timon’ was George Wilkins, a writer of ill-developed dramatic power, who, in ‘The Miseries of Enforced Marriage’ (1607), first treated the story that afterwards served for the plot of ‘The Yorkshire Tragedy.’  At any rate, Wilkins may safely be credited with portions of ‘Pericles,’ a romantic play which can be referred to the same year as ‘Timon.’  Shakespeare contributed only acts III. and V. and parts of IV., which together form a self-contained whole, and do not combine satisfactorily with the remaining scenes.  The presence of a third hand, of inferior merit to Wilkins, has been suspected, and to this collaborator (perhaps William Rowley, a professional reviser of plays who could show capacity on occasion) are best assigned the three scenes of purposeless coarseness which take place in or before a brothel (IV. ii., v. and vi.)  p. 244From so distributed a responsibility the piece naturally suffers.  It lacks homogeneity, and the story is helped out by dumb shows and prologues.  But a matured felicity of expression characterises Shakespeare’s own contributions, narrating the romantic quest of Pericles for his daughter Marina, who was born and abandoned in a shipwreck.  At many points he here anticipated his latest dramatic effects.  The shipwreck is depicted (IV. i.) as impressively as in the ‘Tempest,’ and Marina and her mother Thaisa enjoy many experiences in common with Perdita and Hermione in the ‘Winter’s Tale.’  The prologues, which were not by Shakespeare, were spoken by an actor representing the mediæval poet John Gower, who in the fourteenth century had versified Pericles’s story in his ‘Confessio Amantis’ under the title of ‘Apollonius of Tyre.’  It is also found in a prose translation (from the French), which was printed in Lawrence Twyne’s ‘Patterne of Painfull Adventures’ in 1576, and again in 1607.  After the play was produced, George Wilkins, one of the alleged coadjutors, based on it a novel called ‘The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prynce of Tyre, being the True History of the Play of Pericles as it was lately presented by the worthy and ancient Poet, John Gower’ (1608).  The play was issued as by William Shakespeare in a mangled form in 1608, and again in 1611, 1619, 1630, and 1635.  It was not included in Shakespeare’s collected works till 1664.

‘Antony and Cleopatra.’

In May 1608 Edward Blount entered in the p. 245‘Stationers’ Registers,’ by the authority of Sir George Buc, the licenser of plays, ‘a booke called “Anthony and Cleopatra.”’  No copy of this date is known, and once again the company probably hindered the publication.  The play was first printed in the folio of 1623.  The source of the tragedy is the life of Antonius in North’s ‘Plutarch.’  Shakespeare closely followed the historical narrative, and assimilated not merely its temper, but, in the first three acts, much of its phraseology.  A few short scenes are original, but there is no detail in such a passage, for example, as Enobarbus’s gorgeous description of the pageant of Cleopatra’s voyage up the Cydnus to meet Antony (II. ii. 194 seq.), which is not to be matched in Plutarch.  In the fourth and fifth acts Shakespeare’s method changes and he expands his material with magnificent freedom. [245]  The whole theme is in his hands instinct with a dramatic grandeur which lifts into sublimity even Cleopatra’s moral worthlessness and Antony’s criminal infatuation.  The terse and caustic comments which Antony’s level-headed friend Enobarbus, in the rôle of chorus, passes on the action accentuate its significance.  Into the smallest as into the greatest personages Shakespeare breathed all his vitalising fire.  The ‘happy valiancy’ of the style, too—to use Coleridge’s admirable phrase—sets the tragedy very near the zenith of Shakespeare’s achievement, and while differentiating it p. 246from ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Lear,’ renders it a very formidable rival.

‘Coriolanus.’

‘Coriolanus’ (first printed from a singularly bad text in 1623) similarly owes its origin to the biography of the hero in North’s ‘Plutarch,’ although Shakespeare may have first met the story in Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure’ (No. iv.)  He again adhered to the text of Plutarch with the utmost literalness, and at times—even in the great crises of the action—repeated North’s translation word for word. [246]  But the humorous scenes are wholly of Shakespeare’s invention, and the course of the narrative was at times slightly changed for purposes of dramatic effect.  The metrical characteristics prove the play to have been written about the same period as ‘Antony and p. 247Cleopatra,’ probably in 1609.  In its austere temper it contrasts at all points with its predecessor.  The courageous self-reliance of Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, is severely contrasted with the submissive gentleness of Virgilia, Coriolanus’s wife.  The hero falls a victim to no sensual flaw, but to unchecked pride of caste, and there is a searching irony in the emphasis laid on the ignoble temper of the rabble, who procure his overthrow.  By way of foil, the speeches of Menenius give dignified expression to the maturest political wisdom.  The dramatic interest throughout is as single and as unflaggingly sustained as in ‘Othello.’

p. 248XV—THE LATEST PLAYS

The latest plays.

In ‘Cymbeline,’ ‘The Winter’s Tale,’ and ‘The Tempest,’ the three latest plays that came from his unaided pen, Shakespeare dealt with romantic themes which all end happily, but he instilled into them a pathos which sets them in a category of their own apart alike from comedy and tragedy.  The placidity of tone conspicuous in these three plays (none of which was published in his lifetime) has been often contrasted with the storm and stress of the great tragedies that preceded them.  But the commonly accepted theory that traces in this change of tone a corresponding development in the author’s own emotions ignores the objectivity of Shakespeare’s dramatic work.  All phases of feeling lay within the scope of his intuition, and the successive order in which he approached them bore no explicable relation to substantive incident in his private life or experience.  In middle life, his temperament, like that of other men, acquired a larger measure of gravity and his thought took a profounder cast than characterised it in youth.  The highest topics of tragedy were naturally more congenial to him, and p. 249were certain of a surer handling when he was nearing his fortieth birthday than at an earlier age.  The serenity of meditative romance was more in harmony with the fifth decade of his years than with the second or third.  But no more direct or definite connection can be discerned between the progressive stages of his work and the progressive stages of his life.  To seek in his biography for a chain of events which should be calculated to stir in his own soul all or any of the tempestuous passions that animate his greatest plays is to under-estimate and to misapprehend the resistless might of his creative genius.

‘Cymbeline.’

In ‘Cymbeline’ Shakespeare freely adapted a fragment of British history taken from Holinshed, interweaving with it a story from Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ (day 2, novel ix.)  Ginevra, whose falsely suspected chastity is the theme of the Italian novel, corresponds to Shakespeare’s Imogen.  Her story is also told in the tract called ‘Westward for Smelts,’ which had already been laid under contribution by Shakespeare in the ‘Merry Wives.’ [249]  The by-plot of the banishment of the lord, Belarius, who in revenge for his expatriation kidnapped the king’s young sons and brought them up with him in the recesses of the mountains, is Shakespeare’s invention.  Although most of the scenes are laid in Britain in the first century before the Christian era, there is no pretence of historical vraisemblance.  With an almost ludicrous inappropriateness p. 250the British king’s courtiers make merry with technical terms peculiar to Calvinistic theology, like ‘grace’ and ‘election.’ [250]  The action, which, owing to the combination of three threads of narrative, is exceptionally varied and intricate, wholly belongs to the region of romance.  On Imogen, who is the central figure of the play, Shakespeare lavished all the fascination of his genius.  She is the crown and flower of his conception of tender and artless womanhood.  Her husband Posthumus, her rejected lover Cloten, her would-be seducer Iachimo are contrasted with her and with each other with consummate ingenuity.  The mountainous retreat in which Belarius and his fascinating boy-companions play their part has points of resemblance to the Forest of Arden in ‘As You Like It;’ but life throughout ‘Cymbeline’ is grimly earnest, and the mountains nurture little of the contemplative quiet which characterises existence in the Forest of Arden.  The play contains the splendid lyric ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ (IV. ii. 258 seq.)  The ‘pitiful mummery’ of the vision of Posthumus (V. iv. 30 seq.) must have been supplied by another hand.  Dr. Forman, the astrologer who kept notes of some of his experiences as a playgoer, saw ‘Cymbeline’ acted either in 1610 or 1611.

‘A Winter’s Tale.’

‘A Winter’s Tale’ was seen by Dr. Forman at the Globe on May 15, 1611, and it appears to p. 251have been acted at court on November 5 following. [251a]  It is based upon Greene’s popular romance which was called ‘Pandosto’ in the first edition of 1588, and in numerous later editions, but was ultimately in 1648 re-christened ‘Dorastus and Fawnia.’  Shakespeare followed Greene, his early foe, in allotting a seashore to Bohemia—an error over which Ben Jonson and many later critics have made merry. [251b]  A few lines were obviously drawn from that story of Boccaccio with which Shakespeare had dealt just before in ‘Cymbeline.’ [251c]  But Shakespeare created the high-spirited Paulina and the thievish pedlar Autolycus, whose seductive roguery has become proverbial, and he invented the reconciliation of Leontes, the irrationally jealous husband, with Hermione, his wife, whose dignified resignation and forbearance lend the story its intense pathos.  In the boy Mamilius, the poet depicted childhood in its most attractive guise, while the courtship of Florizel and Perdita is the perfection of gentle romance.  The freshness of the pastoral incident surpasses that of all Shakespeare’s presentations of country life.

‘Tempest.’

p. 252‘The Tempest’ was probably the latest drama that Shakespeare completed.  In the summer of 1609 a fleet bound for Virginia, under the command of Sir George Somers, was overtaken by a storm off the West Indies, and the admiral’s ship, the ‘Sea-Venture,’ was driven on the coast of the hitherto unknown Bermuda Isles.  There they remained ten months, pleasurably impressed by the mild beauty of the climate, but sorely tried by the hogs which overran the island and by mysterious noises which led them to imagine that spirits and devils had made the island their home.  Somers and his men were given up for lost, but they escaped from Bermuda in two boats of cedar to Virginia in May 1610, and the news of their adventures and of their safety was carried to England by some of the seamen in September 1610.  The sailors’ arrival created vast public excitement in London.  At least five accounts were soon published of the shipwreck and of the mysterious island, previously uninhabited by man, which had proved the salvation of the expedition.  ‘A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Ile of Divels,’ written by Sylvester Jourdain or Jourdan, one of the survivors, appeared as early as October.  A second pamphlet describing the disaster was issued by the Council of the Virginia Company in December, and a third by one of the leaders of the expedition, Sir Thomas Gates.  Shakespeare, who mentions the ‘still vexed Bermoothes’ (I. i. 229), incorporated in ‘The Tempest’ many hints from Jourdain, Gates, and the other pamphleteers.  The references to the p. 253gentle climate of the island on which Prospero is cast away, and to the spirits and devils that infested it, seem to render its identification with the newly discovered Bermudas unquestionable.  But Shakespeare incorporated the result of study of other books of travel.  The name of the god Setebos whom Caliban worships is drawn from Eden’s translation of Magellan’s ‘Voyage to the South Pole’ (in the ‘Historie of Travell,’ 1577), where the giants of Patagonia are described as worshipping a ‘great devil they call Setebos.’  No source for the complete plot has been discovered, but the German writer, Jacob Ayrer, who died in 1605, dramatised a somewhat similar story in ‘Die schöne Sidea,’ where the adventures of Prospero, Ferdinand, Ariel, and Miranda are roughly anticipated. [253a]  English actors were performing at Nuremberg, where Ayrer lived, in 1604 and 1606, and may have brought reports of the piece to Shakespeare.  Or perhaps both English and German plays had a common origin in some novel that has not yet been traced.  Gonzalo’s description of an ideal commonwealth (II. i. 147 seq.) is derived from Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s essays (1603), while into Prospero’s great speech renouncing his practice of magical art (V. i. 33-57) Shakespeare wrought reminiscences of Golding’s translation of Medea’s invocation in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (vii. 197-206). [253b]  Golding’s rendering of Ovid had been one of Shakespeare’s best-loved books in youth.

p. 254A highly ingenious theory, first suggested by Tieck, represents ‘The Tempest’ (which, excepting the ‘The Comedy of Errors,’ is the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays) as a masque written to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth (like Miranda, an island-princess) with the Elector Frederick.  This marriage took place on February 14, 1612-13, and ‘The Tempest’ formed one of a series of nineteen plays which were performed at the nuptial festivities in May 1613.  But none of the other plays produced seem to have been new; they were all apparently chosen because they were established favourites at Court and on the public stage, and neither in subject-matter nor language bore obviously specific relation to the joyous occasion.  But 1613 is, in fact, on more substantial ground far too late a date to which to assign the composition of ‘The Tempest.’  According to information which was accessible to Malone, the play had ‘a being and a name’ in the autumn of 1611, and was no doubt written some months before. [254]  p. 255The plot, which revolves about the forcible expulsion of a ruler from his dominions, and his daughter’s wooing by the son of the usurper’s chief ally, is, moreover, hardly one that a shrewd playwright would deliberately choose as the setting of an official epithalamium in honour of the daughter of a monarch so sensitive about his title to the crown as James I. [255a]

In the theatre and at court the early representations of ‘The Tempest’ evoked unmeasured applause.  The success owed something to the beautiful lyrics which were dispersed through the play and had been set to music by Robert Johnson, a lutenist in high repute. [255b]  Like its predecessor ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ ‘The Tempest’ long maintained its first popularity in the theatre, and the vogue of the two pieces drew a passing sneer from Ben Jonson.  In the Induction to his ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ first acted in 1614, he wrote: ‘If there be never a servant-monster in the Fair, who can help it he [i.e. the author] says? nor a nest of Antics.  He is loth to make nature afraid in his plays like those that beget Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries.’  The ‘servant-monster’ was an p. 256obvious allusion to Caliban, and ‘the nest of Antics’ was a glance at the satyrs who figure in the sheepshearing feast in ‘A Winter’s Tale.’

Fanciful interpretations of ‘The Tempest.’

Nowhere did Shakespeare give rein to his imagination with more imposing effect than in ‘The Tempest.’  As in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ magical or supernatural agencies are the mainsprings of the plot.  But the tone is marked at all points by a solemnity and profundity of thought and sentiment which are lacking in the early comedy.  The serious atmosphere has led critics, without much reason, to detect in the scheme of ‘The Tempest’ something more than the irresponsible play of poetic fancy.  Many of the characters have been represented as the outcome of speculation respecting the least soluble problems of human existence.  Little reliance should be placed on such interpretations.  The creation of Miranda is the apotheosis in literature of tender, ingenuous girlhood unsophisticated by social intercourse, but Shakespeare had already sketched the outlines of the portrait in Marina and Perdita, the youthful heroines respectively of ‘Pericles’ and ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ and these two characters were directly developed from romantic stories of girl-princesses, cast by misfortune on the mercies of nature, to which Shakespeare had recourse for the plots of the two plays.  It is by accident, and not by design, that in Ariel appear to be discernible the capabilities of human intellect when detached from physical attributes.  Ariel belongs to the same world as Puck, although p. 257he is delineated in the severer colours that were habitual to Shakespeare’s fully developed art.  Caliban—Ariel’s antithesis—did not owe his existence to any conscious endeavour on Shakespeare’s part to typify human nature before the evolution of moral sentiment. [257a]  Caliban is an imaginary portrait, conceived with matchless vigour and vividness, of the aboriginal savage of the New World, descriptions of whom abounded in contemporary travellers’ speech and writings, and universally excited the liveliest curiosity. [257b]  In Prospero, the guiding providence of the romance, who resigns his magic power in the closing scene, traces have been sought of the lineaments of the dramatist himself, who in this play probably bade farewell to the enchanted work of his life.  Prospero is in the story a scholar-prince of rare intellectual attainments, whose engrossing study of the mysteries of science has given him command of the forces of nature.  His magnanimous renunciation of his magical faculty as soon as by its exercise he has restored his shattered fortunes is in perfect accord with the general conception of his just and philosophical temper.  Any other justification of his final act is superfluous.

Unfinished plays.  The lost play of ‘Cardenio.’

While there is every indication that in 1611 Shakespeare abandoned dramatic composition, there seems p. 258little doubt that he left with the manager of his company unfinished drafts of more than one play which others were summoned at a later date to complete.  His place at the head of the active dramatists was at once filled by John Fletcher, and Fletcher, with some aid possibly from his friend Philip Massinger, undertook the working up of Shakespeare’s unfinished sketches.  On September 9, 1653, the publisher Humphrey Moseley obtained a license for the publication of a play which he described as ‘History of Cardenio, by Fletcher and Shakespeare.’  This was probably identical with the lost play, ‘Cardenno,’ or ‘Cardenna,’ which was twice acted at Court by Shakespeare’s company in 1613—in May during the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage festivities, and on June 8 before the Duke of Savoy’s ambassador. [258a]  Moseley, whose description may have been fraudulent, [258b] failed to publish the piece, and nothing is otherwise known of it with certainty; but it was no doubt a dramatic version of the adventures of the lovelorn Cardenio which are related in the first part of ‘Don Quixote’ (ch. xxiii.-xxxvii.)  Cervantes’s amorous story, which first appeared in English in Thomas Shelton’s translation in 1612, offers much incident in Fletcher’s vein.  When Lewis Theobald, p. 259the Shakespearean critic, brought out his ‘Double Falshood, or the Distrest Lovers,’ in 1727, he mysteriously represented that the play was based on an unfinished and unpublished draft of a play by Shakespeare.  The story of Theobald’s piece is the story of Cardenio, although the characters are renamed.  There is nothing in the play as published by Theobald to suggest Shakespeare’s hand, [259a] but Theobald doubtless took advantage of a tradition that Shakespeare and Fletcher had combined to dramatise the Cervantic theme.

‘Two Noble Kinsmen.’

Two other pieces, ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ and ‘Henry VIII,’ which are attributed to a similar partnership, survive. [259b]  ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ was first printed in 1634, and was written, according to the title-page, ‘by the memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen.’  It was included in the folio of Beaumont and Fletcher of 1679.  On grounds alike of æsthetic criticism and metrical tests, a substantial portion of the play was assigned to Shakespeare by Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Dyce.  The last included it in his edition of Shakespeare.  Coleridge detected Shakespeare’s hand in act I., act II. sc. i., and act III. sc. i. and ii.  In addition to p. 260those scenes, act IV. sc. iii. and act V. (except sc. ii.) were subsequently placed to his credit.  Some recent critics assign much of the alleged Shakespearean work to Massinger, and they narrow Shakespeare’s contribution to the first scene (with the opening song, ‘Roses their sharp spines being gone’) and act V. sc. i. and iv. [260]  An exact partition is impossible, but frequent signs of Shakespeare’s workmanship are unmistakable.  All the passages for which Shakespeare can on any showing be held responsible develop the main plot, which is drawn from Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ of Palamon and Arcite, and seems to have been twice dramatised previously.  A lost play, ‘Palæmon and Arcyte,’ by Richard Edwardes, was acted at Court in 1566, and a second piece, called ‘Palamon and Arsett’ (also lost), was purchased by Henslowe in 1594.  The non-Shakespearean residue of ‘The Two Noble Kinsmen’ is disfigured by indecency and triviality, and is of no literary value.

‘Henry VIII.’

A like problem is presented by ‘Henry VIII.’  The play was nearly associated with the final scene in the history of that theatre which was identified with the triumphs of Shakespeare’s career.  ‘Henry VIII’ was in course of performance at the Globe Theatre on June 29, 1613, when the firing of some cannon incidental to the performance set fire to the playhouse, which was burned down.  The theatre was rebuilt next year, but the p. 261new fabric never acquired the fame of the old.  Sir Henry Wotton, describing the disaster on July 2, entitled the piece that was in process of representation at the time as ‘All is True representing some principal pieces in the Reign of Henry VIII.’ [261]  The play of ‘Henry VIII’ that is commonly allotted to Shakespeare is loosely constructed, and the last act ill p. 262coheres with its predecessors.  The whole resembles an ‘historical masque.’  It was first printed in the folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1623, but shows traces of more hands than one.  The three chief characters—the king, Queen Katharine of Arragon, and Cardinal Wolsey—bear clear marks of Shakespeare’s best workmanship; but only act i. sc. i., act ii. sc. iii. and iv. (Katharine’s trial), act iii. sc. ii. (except ll. 204-460), act v. sc. i. can on either æsthetic or metrical grounds be confidently assigned to him.  These portions may, according to their metrical characteristics, be dated, like the ‘Winter’s Tale,’ about 1611.  There are good grounds for assigning nearly all the remaining thirteen scenes to the pen of Fletcher, with occasional aid from Massinger.  Wolsey’s familiar farewell to Cromwell (III. ii. 204-460) is the only passage the authorship of which excites really grave embarrassment.  It recalls at every point the style of Fletcher, and nowhere that of Shakespeare.  But the Fletcherian style, as it is here displayed, is invested with a greatness that is not matched elsewhere in Fletcher’s work.  That Fletcher should have exhibited such faculty once and once only is barely credible, and we are driven to the alternative conclusion that the noble valediction was by Shakespeare, who in it gave proof of his versatility by echoing in a glorified key the habitual strain of Fletcher, his colleague and virtual successor.  James Spedding’s theory that Fletcher hastily completed Shakespeare’s unfinished draft for the special purpose of enabling the company to celebrate the marriage of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine, which p. 263took place on February 14, 1612-13, seems fanciful.  During May 1613, according to an extant list, nineteen plays were produced at Court in honour of the event, but ‘Henry VIII’ is not among them. [263a]  The conjecture that Massinger and Fletcher alone collaborated in ‘Henry VIII’ (to the exclusion of Shakespeare altogether) does not deserve serious consideration. [263b]

p. 264XVI—THE CLOSE OF LIFE

Plays at Court in 1613.  Actor-friends.

The concluding years of Shakespeare’s life (1611-1616) were mainly passed at Stratford.  It is probable that in 1611 he disposed of his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres.  He owned none at the date of his death.  But until 1614 he paid frequent visits to London, where friends in sympathy with his work were alone to be found.  His plays continued to form the staple of Court performances.  In May 1613, during the Princess Elizabeth’s marriage festivities, Heming, Shakespeare’s former colleague, produced at Whitehall no fewer than seven of his plays, viz. ‘Much Ado,’ ‘Tempest,’ ‘Winter’s Tale,’ ‘Sir John Falstaff’ (i.e. ‘Merry Wives’), ‘Othello,’ ‘Julius Cæsar,’ ‘and Hotspur’ (doubtless ‘Henry IV’). [264]  Of his actor-friends, one of the chief, Augustine Phillips, had died in 1605, leaving by will ‘to my fellowe, William Shakespeare, a thirty-shillings piece of gold.’  With Burbage, Heming, and Condell his relations remained close to the end.  Burbage, according to a poetic elegy, made his reputation by creating the leading parts in Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies.  Hamlet, p. 265Othello, and Lear were rôles in which he gained especial renown.  But Burbage and Shakespeare were popularly credited with co-operation in less solemn enterprises.  They were reputed to be companions in many sportive adventures.  The sole anecdote of Shakespeare that is positively known to have been recorded in his lifetime relates that Burbage, when playing Richard III, agreed with a lady in the audience to visit her after the performance; Shakespeare, overhearing the conversation, anticipated the actor’s visit, and met Burbage on his arrival with the quip that ‘William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.’ [265a]

Such gossip possibly deserves little more acceptance than the later story, in the same key, which credits Shakespeare with the paternity of Sir William D’Avenant.  The latter was baptised at Oxford on March 3, 1605, as the son of John D’Avenant, the landlord of the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare lodged in his journeys to and from Stratford.  The story of Shakespeare’s parental relation to D’Avenant was long current in Oxford, and was at times complacently accepted by the reputed son.  Shakespeare is known to have been a welcome guest at John D’Avenant’s house, and another son, Robert, boasted of the kindly notice which the poet took of him as a child. [265b]  It is safer to adopt the less compromising version which makes Shakespeare the p. 266godfather of the boy William instead of his father.  But the antiquity and persistence of the scandal belie the assumption that Shakespeare was known to his contemporaries as a man of scrupulous virtue.  Ben Jonson and Drayton—the latter a Warwickshire man—seem to have been Shakespeare’s closest literary friends in his latest years.

Final settlement at Stratford.

At Stratford, in the words of Nicholas Rowe, ‘the latter part of Shakespeare’s life was spent, as all men of good sense will wish theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends.’  As a resident in the town, he took a full share of social and civic responsibilities.  On October 16, 1608, he stood chief godfather to William, son of Henry Walker, a mercer and alderman.  On September 11, 1611, when he had finally settled in New Place, his name appeared in the margin of a folio page of donors (including all the principal inhabitants of Stratford) to a fund that was raised ‘towards the charge of prosecuting the bill in Parliament for the better repair of the highways.’

Domestic affairs.

Meanwhile his own domestic affairs engaged some of his attention.  Of his two surviving children—both daughters—the eldest, Susanna, had married, on June 5, 1607, John Hall (1575-1635), a rising physician of Puritan leanings, and in the following February there was born the poet’s only granddaughter, Elizabeth Hall.  On September 9, 1608, the poet’s mother was buried in the parish church, and on February 4, 1613, his third brother Richard.  On July 15, 1613, Mrs. Hall preferred, p. 267with her father’s assistance, a charge of slander against one Lane in the ecclesiastical court at Worcester; the defendant, who had apparently charged the lady with illicit relations with one Ralph Smith, did not appear, and was excommunicated.

Purchase of a house in Blackfriars.

In the same year (1613), when on a short visit to London, Shakespeare invested a small sum of money in a new property.  This was his last investment in real estate.  He then purchased a house, the ground-floor of which was a haberdasher’s shop, with a yard attached.  It was situated within six hundred feet of the Blackfriars Theatre—on the west side of St. Andrew’s Hill, formerly termed Puddle Hill or Puddle Dock Hill, in the near neighbourhood of what is now known as Ireland Yard.  The former owner, Henry Walker, a musician, had bought the property for £100 in 1604.  Shakespeare in 1613 agreed to pay him £140.  The deeds of conveyance bear the date of March 10 in that year. [267]  Next day, on March 11, Shakespeare executed another deed (now in the British Museum) which stipulated that £60 of the purchase-money was to remain on mortgage until the following Michaelmas.  The money was unpaid at Shakespeare’s death.  In both purchase-deed and mortgage-deed Shakespeare’s signature was witnessed by (among others) Henry Lawrence, ‘servant’ or clerk to Robert Andrewes, the scrivener who drew p. 268the deeds, and Lawrence’s seal, bearing his initials ‘H. L.,’ was stamped in each case on the parchment-tag, across the head of which Shakespeare wrote his name.  In all three documents—the two indentures and the mortgage-deed—Shakespeare is described as ‘of Stratford-on-Avon, in the Countie of Warwick, Gentleman.’  There is no reason to suppose that he acquired the house for his own residence.  He at once leased the property to John Robinson, already a resident in the neighbourhood.

Attempt to enclose the Stratford common fields.

With puritans and puritanism Shakespeare was not in sympathy, [268] and he could hardly have viewed with unvarying composure the steady progress that puritanism was making among his fellow-townsmen.  Nevertheless a preacher, doubtless of puritan proclivities, was entertained at Shakespeare’s residence, New Place, after delivering a sermon in the spring of 1614.  The incident might serve to illustrate Shakespeare’s characteristic placability, but his son-in-law Hall, who avowed sympathy with puritanism, was p. 269probably in the main responsible for the civility. [269a]  In July John Combe, a rich inhabitant of Stratford, died and left £5 to Shakespeare.  The legend that Shakespeare alienated him by composing some doggerel on his practice of lending money at ten or twelve per cent. seems apocryphal, although it is quoted by Aubrey and accepted by Rowe. [269b]  Combe’s death involved Shakespeare more conspicuously than before in civic affairs.  Combe’s heir William no sooner succeeded to his father’s lands than he, with a neighbouring owner, Arthur Mannering, steward of Lord-chancellor Ellesmere (who was ex-officio lord of the manor), attempted p. 270to enclose the common fields, which belonged to the corporation of Stratford, about his estate at Welcombe.  The corporation resolved to offer the scheme a stout resistance.  Shakespeare had a twofold interest in the matter by virtue of his owning the freehold of 106 acres at Welcombe and Old Stratford, and as joint owner—now with Thomas Greene, the town clerk—of the tithes of Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton.  His interest in his freeholds could not have been prejudicially affected, but his interest in the tithes might be depreciated by the proposed enclosure.  Shakespeare consequently joined with his fellow-owner Greene in obtaining from Combe’s agent Replingham in October 1614 a deed indemnifying both against any injury they might suffer from the enclosure.  But having thus secured himself against all possible loss, Shakespeare threw his influence into Combe’s scale.  In November 1614 he was on a last visit to London, and Greene, whose official position as town clerk compelled him to support the corporation in defiance of his private interests, visited him there to discuss the position of affairs.  On December 23, 1614, the corporation in formal meeting drew up a letter to Shakespeare imploring him to aid them.  Greene himself sent to the dramatist ‘a note of inconveniences [to the corporation that] would happen by the enclosure.’  But although an ambiguous entry of a later date (September 1615) in the few extant pages of Greene’s ungrammatical diary has been unjustifiably tortured into an expression of disgust on Shakespeare’s part p. 271at Combe’s conduct, [271] it is plain that, in the spirit of his agreement with Combe’s agent, he continued to lend Combe his countenance.  Happily Combe’s efforts failed, and the common lands remain unenclosed.

Death.  Burial.

At the beginning of 1616 Shakespeare’s health was failing.  He directed Francis Collins, a solicitor of Warwick, to draft his will, but, though it was prepared for signature on January 25, it was for the time laid aside.  On February 10, 1616, Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, married, at Stratford parish church, Thomas Quincy, four years her junior, a son of an old friend of the poet.  The ceremony took place apparently without public asking of the banns and before a license was procured.  The irregularity led to the summons of the bride and bridegroom to the ecclesiastical court at Worcester and the imposition of a fine.  According to the testimony of John Ward, the vicar, Shakespeare entertained at New Place his two friends, Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson, in this same spring of 1616, and ‘had a p. 272merry meeting,’ but ‘itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.’  A popular local legend, which was not recorded till 1762, [272a] credited Shakespeare with engaging at an earlier date in a prolonged and violent drinking bout at Bidford, a neighbouring village, [272b] but his achievements as a hard drinker may be dismissed as unproven.  The cause of his death is undetermined, but probably his illness seemed likely to take a fatal turn in March, when he revised and signed the will that had been drafted in the previous January.  On Tuesday, April 23, he died at the age of fifty-two. [272c]  On Thursday, April 25 (O.S.), the poet was buried inside Stratford Church, near the northern wall of the chancel, in which, as part-owner of the tithes, and consequently one of the lay-rectors, he had a right of interment.  Hard by was the charnel-house, where bones dug up from the churchyard were deposited.  Over the poet’s grave were inscribed the lines:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbeare
To dig the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

According to one William Hall, who described a p. 273visit to Stratford in 1694, [273] these verses were penned by Shakespeare to suit ‘the capacity of clerks and sextons, for the most part a very ignorant set of people.’  Had this curse not threatened them, Hall proceeds, the sexton would not have hesitated in course of time to remove Shakespeare’s dust to ‘the bone-house.’  As it was, the grave was made seventeen feet deep, and was never opened, even to receive his wife, although she expressed a desire to be buried with her husband.

The will.  Bequest to his wife.

Shakespeare’s will, the first draft of which was drawn up before January 25, 1616, received many interlineations and erasures before it was signed in the ensuing March.  Francis Collins, the solicitor of Warwick, and Thomas Russell, ‘esquier,’ of Stratford, were the overseers; it was proved by John Hall, the poet’s son-in-law and joint-executor with Mrs. Hall, in London on June 22 following.  The religious exordium is in conventional phraseology, and gives no clue to Shakespeare’s personal religious opinions.  What those opinions were, we have neither the means nor the warrant for discussing.  But while it is possible to quote from the plays many contemptuous references to the puritans and their doctrines, we may dismiss as idle gossip Davies’s irresponsible report that ‘he dyed a papist.’  The name of Shakespeare’s wife was omitted from the original draft of the will, but by an interlineation in the final draft she received his second best bed p. 274with its furniture.  No other bequest was made her.  Several wills of the period have been discovered in which a bedstead or other article of household furniture formed part of a wife’s inheritance, but none except Shakespeare’s is forthcoming in which a bed forms the sole bequest.  At the same time the precision with which Shakespeare’s will accounts for and assigns to other legatees every known item of his property refutes the conjecture that he had set aside any portion of it under a previous settlement or jointure with a view to making independent provision for his wife.  Her right to a widow’s dower—i.e. to a third share for life in freehold estate—was not subject to testamentary disposition, but Shakespeare had taken steps to prevent her from benefiting—at any rate to the full extent—by that legal arrangement.  He had barred her dower in the case of his latest purchase of freehold estate, viz. the house at Blackfriars. [274]  p. 275Such procedure is pretty conclusive proof that he had the intention of excluding her from the enjoyment of his possessions after his death.  But, however plausible the theory that his relations with her were from first to last wanting in sympathy, it is improbable that either the slender mention of her in the will or the barring of her dower was designed by Shakespeare to make public his indifference or dislike.  Local tradition subsequently credited her with a wish to be buried in his grave; and her epitaph proves that she inspired her daughters with genuine affection.  Probably her ignorance of affairs and the infirmities of age (she was past sixty) combined to unfit her in the poet’s eyes for the control of property, and, as an act of ordinary prudence, he committed her to the care of his elder daughter, who inherited, according to such information as is accessible, some of his own shrewdness, and had a capable adviser in her husband.

His heiress.  Legacies to friends.

This elder daughter, Susanna Hall, was, according to the will, to become mistress of New Place, and practically of all the poet’s estate.  She received (with remainder to her issue in strict entail) New Place, all the land, barns, and gardens at and near Stratford (except the tenement in Chapel Lane), and the house in Blackfriars, London, while she and her husband were appointed executors and residuary legatees, with full rights over nearly all the poet’s household furniture and personal belongings.  To their only child and the testator’s granddaughter, or ‘niece,’ Elizabeth Hall, was bequeathed p. 276the poet’s plate, with the exception of his broad silver and gilt bowl, which was reserved for his younger daughter, Judith.  To his younger daughter he also left, with the tenement in Chapel Lane (in remainder to the elder daughter), £150 in money, of which £100, her marriage portion, was to be paid within a year, and another £150 to be paid to her if alive three years after the date of the will. [276a]  To the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, whose husband, William Hart, predeceased the testator by only six days, he left, besides a contingent reversionary interest in Judith’s pecuniary legacy, his wearing apparel, £20 in money, a life interest in the Henley Street property, with £5 for each of her three sons, William, Thomas, and Michael.  To the poor of Stratford he gave £10, and to Mr. Thomas Combe (apparently a brother of William, of the enclosure controversy) his sword.  To each of his Stratford friends, Hamlett Sadler, William Reynoldes, Anthony Nash, and John Nash, and to each of his ‘fellows’ (i.e. theatrical colleagues in London), John Heming, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell, he left xxvjs. viijd., with which to buy memorial rings.  His godson, William Walker, received ‘xx’ shillings in gold.

The tomb.

Before 1623 [276b] an elaborate monument, by a London sculptor of Dutch birth, Gerard Johnson, was erected p. 277to Shakespeare’s memory in the chancel of the parish church. [277]  It includes a half-length bust, depicting the dramatist on the point of writing.  The fingers of the right hand are disposed as if holding a pen, and under the left hand lies a quarto sheet of paper.  The inscription, which was apparently by a London friend, runs:

Judicio Pylium, genio Socratem, arte Maronem,
Terra tegit, populus mæret, Olympus habet.

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath plast
Within this monument; Shakespeare with whome
Quick nature dide; whose name doth deck ys tombe
Far more than cost; sith all yt he hath writt
Leaves living art but page to serve his witt.

Obiit ano. doi 1616      Ætatis 53        Die 23 Ap.

Personal character.

At the opening of Shakespeare’s career Chettle wrote of his ‘civil demeanour’ and of the reports of ‘his uprightness of dealing which argues his honesty.’  In 1601—when near the zenith of his fame—he was apostrophised as ‘sweet Master Shakespeare’ in the play of ‘The Return from Parnassus,’ and that adjective was long after associated with his name.  In 1604 one Anthony Scoloker in a poem called ‘Daiphantus’ bestowed on him the epithet ‘friendly.’  After the close of his career Jonson wrote of him: ‘I loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much as any.  He was, indeed, honest and of an open and free p. 278nature.’ [278a]  No other contemporary left on record any definite impression of Shakespeare’s personal character, and the ‘Sonnets,’ which alone of his literary work can be held to throw any illumination on a personal trait, mainly reveal him in the light of one who was willing to conform to all the conventional methods in vogue for strengthening the bonds between a poet and a great patron.  His literary practices and aims were those of contemporary men of letters, and the difference in the quality of his work and theirs was due not to conscious endeavour on his part to act otherwise than they, but to the magic and involuntary working of his genius.  He seemed unconscious of his marvellous superiority to his professional comrades.  The references in his will to his fellow-actors, and the spirit in which (as they announce in the First Folio) they approached the task of collecting his works after his death, corroborate the description of him as a sympathetic friend of gentle, unassuming mien.  The later traditions brought together by Aubrey depict him as ‘very good company, and of a very ready and pleasant smooth wit,’ and there is much in other early posthumous references to suggest a genial, if not a convivial, temperament, linked to a quiet turn for good-humoured satire.  But Bohemian ideals and modes of life had no genuine attraction for Shakespeare.  His extant work attests his ‘copious’ and continuous industry, [278b] and with his literary power and p. 279sociability there clearly went the shrewd capacity of a man of business.  Pope had just warrant for the surmise that he

For gain not glory winged his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.

His literary attainments and successes were chiefly valued as serving the prosaic end of providing permanently for himself and his daughters.  His highest ambition was to restore among his fellow-townsmen the family repute which his father’s misfortunes had imperilled.  Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards life’s ordinary incidents.

p. 280XVII—SURVIVORS AND DESCENDANTS

The survivors.  Mistress Judith Quiney.

Shakespeare’s widow died on August 6, 1623, at the age of sixty-seven, and was buried near her husband inside the chancel two days later.  Some affectionately phrased Latin elegiacs—doubtless from Dr. Hall’s pen—were inscribed on a brass plate fastened to the stone above her grave. [280]  The younger daughter, Judith, resided with her husband, Thomas Quiney, at The Cage, a house which he leased in Bridge Street from 1616 till 1652.  There he carried on the trade of a vintner, and took part in municipal affairs, acting as a councillor from 1617 and as chamberlain in 1621-2 and 1622-3; but after 1630 his affairs grew embarrassed, and he left Stratford late in 1652 for London, where he seems to have died a few months later.  Of his three sons by Judith, the eldest, Shakespeare (baptised on November 23, 1616), was buried in Stratford Churchyard on May 8, 1617; the second son, p. 281Richard (baptised on February 9, 1617-18), was buried on January 28, 1638-9; and the third son, Thomas (baptised on January 23, 1619-20), was buried on February 26, 1638-9.  Judith survived her husband, sons, and sister, dying at Stratford on February 9, 1661-2, in her seventy-seventh year.

Mistress Susannah Hall.

The poet’s elder daughter, Mrs. Susanna Hall, resided at New Place till her death.  Her sister Judith alienated to her the Chapel Place tenement before 1633, but that, with the interest in the Stratford tithes, she soon disposed of.  Her husband, Dr. John Hall, died on November 25, 1635.  In 1642 James Cooke, a surgeon in attendance on some Royalist troops stationed at Stratford, visited Mrs. Hall and examined manuscripts in her possession, but they were apparently of her husband’s, not of her father’s, composition. [281]  From July 11 to 13, 1643, Queen Henrietta Maria, while journeying from Newark to Oxford, was billeted on Mrs. Hall at New Place for three days, and was visited there by Prince Rupert.  Mrs. Hall was buried beside her husband in Stratford Churchyard on July 11, 1649, and a rhyming inscription, describing her as ‘witty above her sex,’ was engraved on her tombstone.  The whole inscription ran: ‘Heere lyeth ye body of Svsanna, wife to John Hall, Gent. ye davghter of William Shakespeare, Gent.  She deceased ye 11th of Jvly, A.D. 1649, aged 66.

  ‘Witty above her sexe, but that’s not all,
Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall,
p. 282Something of Shakespere was in that, but this
Wholy of him with whom she’s now in blisse.
Then, passenger, ha’st ne’re a teare,
  To weepe with her that wept with all?
That wept, yet set herselfe to chere
  Them up with comforts cordiall.
Her Love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou hast ne’re a teare to shed.’

The last descendant.

Mrs. Hall’s only child, Elizabeth, was the last surviving descendant of the poet.  In April 1626 she married her first husband, Thomas Nash of Stratford (b. 1593), who studied at Lincoln’s Inn, was a man of property, and, dying childless at New Place on April 4, 1647, was buried in Stratford Church next day.  At Billesley, a village four miles from Stratford, on June 5, 1649, Mrs. Nash married, as a second husband, a widower, John Bernard or Barnard of Abington, Northamptonshire, who was knighted by Charles II in 1661.  About the same date she seems to have abandoned New Place for her husband’s residence at Abington.  Dying without issue, she was buried there on February 17, 1669-70.  Her husband survived her four years, and was buried beside her. [282]  On her mother’s death in 1649 Lady Barnard inherited under the poet’s will the land near Stratford, New Place, the house at Blackfriars, and (on the death of the poet’s sister, Joan Hart, in 1646) the houses in Henley Street, while her father, Dr. Hall, left her in 1635 a house at Acton with a meadow.  She sold the Blackfriars house, and apparently the Stratford land, before 1667.  By her will, dated January p. 2831669-70, and proved in the following March, she left small bequests to the daughters of Thomas Hathaway, of the family of her grandmother, the poet’s wife.  The houses in Henley Street passed to her cousin, Thomas Hart, the grandson of the poet’s sister Joan, and they remained in the possession of Thomas’s direct descendants till 1806 (the male line expired on the death of John Hart in 1800).  By her will Lady Barnard also ordered New Place to be sold, and it was purchased on May 18, 1675, by Sir Edward Walker, through whose daughter Barbara, wife of Sir John Clopton, it reverted to the Clopton family.  Sir John rebuilt it in 1702.  On the death of his son Hugh in 1752, it was bought by the Rev. Francis Gastrell (d. 1768), who demolished the new building in 1759. [283]

Shakespeare’s brothers.

Of Shakespeare’s three brothers, only one, Gilbert, seems to have survived him.  Edmund, the youngest brother, ‘a player,’ was buried at St. Saviour’s Church, Southwark, ‘with a fore-noone knell of the great bell,’ on December 31, 1607; he was in his twenty-eighth year.  Richard, John Shakespeare’s third son, died at Stratford in February 1613, aged 29.  ‘Gilbert Shakespeare adolescens,’ who was buried at Stratford on February 3, 1611-12, was doubtless son of the poet’s next brother, Gilbert; the latter, having nearly completed his forty-sixth year, could scarcely be described as ‘adolescens;’ his death is not recorded, but according to Oldys he survived to a patriarchal age.

p. 284XVIII—AUTOGRAPHS, PORTRAITS, AND MEMORIALS

Spelling of the poet’s surname.  Autograph signatures.

Much controversy has arisen over the spelling of the poet’s surname.  It has been proved capable of four thousand variations. [284]  The name of the poet’s father is entered sixty-six times in the council books of Stratford, and is spelt in sixteen ways.  The commonest form is ‘Shaxpeare.’  Five autographs of the poet of undisputed authenticity are extant: his signature to the indenture relating to the purchase of the property in Blackfriars, dated March 10, 1612-13 (since 1841 in the Guildhall Library); his signature to the mortgage-deed relating to the same purchase, dated March 11, 1612-13 (since 1858 in the British Museum), and the three signatures on the three sheets of his will, dated March 25, 1615-16 (now at Somerset House).  In all the signatures some of the letters are represented by recognised signs of abbreviation.  The signature to the first document is ‘William Shakspere,’ though in all other portions of the deed the name is spelt ‘Shakespeare.’  The signature to the second p. 285document has been interpreted both as Shakspere and Shakspeare.  The ink of the first signature in the will has now faded almost beyond decipherment, but that it was ‘Shakspere’ may be inferred from the facsimile made by Steevens in 1776.  The second and third signatures to the will, which are also somewhat difficult to decipher, have been read both as Shakspere and Shakspeare; but a close examination suggests that whatever the second signature may be, the third is ‘Shakespeare.’  Shakspere is the spelling of the alleged autograph in the British Museum copy of Florio’s ‘Montaigne,’ but the genuineness of that signature is disputable. [285]  Shakespeare was the form adopted in the full signature appended to the dedicatory epistles of the ‘Venus and Adonis’ of 1593 and the ‘Lucrece’ of 1594, volumes which were produced under the poet’s supervision.  It is the spelling adopted on the title-pages of the majority of contemporary editions of his works, whether or not produced under his supervision.  It is adopted in almost all the published references to the poet during the seventeenth century.  It appears in the grant of arms in 1596, in the license to the players of 1603, and in the text of all the legal documents relating to the poet’s property.  The poet, like most of his contemporaries, acknowledged no finality on the subject.  According to the best authority, he spelt his surname in two ways when signing his will.  There is consequently p. 286no good ground for abandoning the form Shakespeare, which is sanctioned by legal and literary custom. [286]

Shakespeare’s portraits.  The Stratford bust.  The ‘Stratford’ portrait.

Aubrey reported that Shakespeare was ‘a handsome well-shap’t man,’ but no portrait exists which can be said with absolute certainty to have been executed during his lifetime, although one has recently been discovered with a good claim to that distinction.  Only two of the extant portraits are positively known to have been produced within a short period after his death.  These are the bust in Stratford Church and the frontispiece to the folio of 1623.  Each is an inartistic attempt at a posthumous likeness.  There is considerable discrepancy between the two; their main points of resemblance are the baldness on the top of the head and the fulness of the hair about the ears.  The bust was by Gerard Johnson or Janssen, who was a Dutch stonemason or tombmaker settled in Southwark.  It was set up in the church before 1623, and is a rudely carved specimen of mortuary sculpture.  There are marks about the forehead and ears which suggest that the face was fashioned from a death mask, but the workmanship is at all points clumsy.  The round face and eyes present a heavy, unintellectual expression.  The bust was originally coloured, but in 1793 Malone caused it to be whitewashed.  In 1861 the whitewash was removed, and the colours, as far as traceable, restored.  The eyes are light hazel, the hair and beard auburn.  There p. 287have been numberless reproductions, both engraved and photographic.  It was first engraved—very imperfectly—for Rowe’s edition in 1709; then by Vertue for Pope’s edition of 1725; and by Gravelot for Hanmer’s edition in 1744.  A good engraving by William Ward appeared in 1816.  A phototype and a chromo-phototype, issued by the New Shakspere Society, are the best reproductions for the purposes of study.  The pretentious painting known as the ‘Stratford’ portrait, and presented in 1867 by W. O. Hunt, town clerk of Stratford, to the Birthplace Museum, where it is very prominently displayed, was probably painted from the bust late in the eighteenth century; it lacks either historic or artistic interest.

Droeshout’s engraving.

The engraved portrait—nearly a half-length—which was printed on the title-page of the folio of 1623, was by Martin Droeshout.  On the opposite page lines by Ben Jonson congratulate ‘the graver’ on having satisfactorily ‘hit’ the poet’s ‘face.’  Jonson’s testimony does no credit to his artistic discernment; the expression of countenance, which is very crudely rendered, is neither distinctive nor lifelike.  The face is long and the forehead high; the top of the head is bald, but the hair falls in abundance over the ears.  There is a scanty moustache and a thin tuft under the lower lip.  A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck.  The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders.  The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as p. 288compared with those of the body.  In the unique proof copy which belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps (now with his collection in America) the tone is clearer than in the ordinary copies, and the shadows are less darkened by cross-hatching and coarse dotting.  The engraver, Martin Droeshout, belonged to a Flemish family of painters and engravers long settled in London, where he was born in 1601.  He was thus fifteen years old at the time of Shakespeare’s death in 1616, and it is consequently improbable that he had any personal knowledge of the dramatist.  The engraving was doubtless produced by Droeshout very shortly before the publication of the First Folio in 1623, when he had completed his twenty-second year.  It thus belongs to the outset of the engraver’s professional career, in which he never achieved extended practice or reputation.  A copy of the Droeshout engraving, by William Marshall, was prefixed to Shakespeare’s ‘Poems’ in 1640, and William Faithorne made another copy for the frontispiece of the edition of ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ published in 1655.

The ‘Droeshout’ painting.

There is little doubt that young Droeshout in fashioning his engraving worked from a painting, and there is a likelihood that the original picture from which the youthful engraver worked has lately come to light.  As recently as 1892 Mr. Edgar Flower, of Stratford-on-Avon, discovered in the possession of Mr. H. C. Clements, a private gentleman with artistic tastes residing at Peckham Rye, a portrait alleged to represent Shakespeare.  The picture, which was faded and somewhat p. 289worm-eaten, dated beyond all doubt from the early years of the seventeenth century.  It was painted on a panel formed of two planks of old elm, and in the upper left-hand corner was the inscription ‘Will^m Shakespeare, 1609.’  Mr. Clements purchased the portrait of an obscure dealer about 1840, and knew nothing of its history, beyond what he set down on a slip of paper when he acquired it.  The note that he then wrote and pasted on the box in which he preserved the picture, ran as follows: ‘The original portrait of Shakespeare, from which the now famous Droeshout engraving was taken and inserted in the first collected edition of his works, published in 1623, being seven years after his death.  The picture was painted nine [verè seven] years before his death, and consequently sixteen [verè fourteen] years before it was published. . . .  The picture was publicly exhibited in London seventy years ago, and many thousands went to see it.’  In all its details and in its comparative dimensions, especially in the disproportion between the size of the head and that of the body, this picture is identical with the Droeshout engraving.  Though coarsely and stiffly drawn, the face is far more skilfully presented than in the engraving, and the expression of countenance betrays some artistic sentiment which is absent from the print.  Connoisseurs, including Sir Edward Poynter, Mr. Sidney Colvin, and Mr. Lionel Cust, have almost unreservedly pronounced the picture to be anterior in date to the engraving, and they have reached the conclusion that in all probability Martin Droeshout p. 290directly based his work upon the painting.  Influences of an early seventeenth-century Flemish school are plainly discernible in the picture, and it is just possible that it is the production of an uncle of the young engraver Martin Droeshout, who bore the same name as his nephew, and was naturalised in this country on January 25, 1608, when he was described as a ‘painter of Brabant.’  Although the history of the portrait rests on critical conjecture and on no external contemporary evidence, there seems good ground for regarding it as a portrait of Shakespeare painted in his lifetime—in the forty-fifth year of his age.  No other pictorial representation of the poet has equally serious claims to be treated as contemporary with himself, and it therefore presents features of unique interest.  On the death of its owner, Mr. Clements, in 1895, the painting was purchased by Mrs. Charles Flower, and was presented to the Memorial Picture Gallery at Stratford, where it now hangs.  No attempt at restoration has been made.  A photogravure forms the frontispiece to the present volume. [290]

Of the same type as the Droeshout engraving, although less closely resembling it than the picture just described, is the ‘Ely House’ portrait (now the property of the Birthplace Trustees at Stratford), p. 291which formerly belonged to Thomas Turton, Bishop of Ely, and it is inscribed ‘Æ. 39 x. 1603.’ [291a]  This painting is of high artistic value.  The features are of a far more attractive and intellectual cast than in either the Droeshout painting or engraving, and the many differences in detail raise doubts as to whether the person represented can have been intended for Shakespeare.  Experts are of opinion that the picture was painted early in the seventeenth century.

Early in Charles II’s reign Lord Chancellor Clarendon added a portrait of Shakespeare to his great gallery in his house in St. James’s.  Mention is made of it in a letter from the diarist John Evelyn to his friend Samuel Pepys in 1689, but Clarendon’s collection was dispersed at the end of the seventeenth century and the picture has not been traced. [291b]

Later portraits.

Of the numerous extant paintings which have been described as portraits of Shakespeare, only the ‘Droeshout’ portrait and the Ely House portrait, both of which are at Stratford, bear any definable resemblance to the folio engraving or the bust in the church. [291c]  In spite of their p. 292admitted imperfections, those presentments can alone be held indisputably to have been honestly designed to depict the poet’s features.  They must be treated as the standards of authenticity in judging of the genuineness of other portraits claiming to be of an early date.

The ‘Chandos’ portrait.

Of other alleged portraits which are extant, the most famous and interesting is the ‘Chandos’ portrait, now in the National Portrait Gallery.  Its pedigree suggests that it was intended to represent the poet, but numerous and conspicuous divergences from the authenticated likenesses show that it was painted from fanciful descriptions of him some years after his death.  The face is bearded, and rings adorn the ears.  Oldys reported that it was from the brush of Burbage, Shakespeare’s fellow-actor, who had some reputation as a limner, [292] and that it had belonged to Joseph Taylor, an actor contemporary with Shakespeare.  These rumours are not corroborated; but there is no doubt that it was at one time the property of D’Avenant, and that it subsequently belonged successively to the actor p. 293Betterton and to Mrs. Barry the actress.  In 1693 Sir Godfrey Kneller made a copy as a gift for Dryden.  After Mrs Barry’s death in 1713 it was purc